by Thomas Penn
Earlier that March a team of English negotiators, headed by Richard Beauchamp, bishop of Salisbury, and including the ubiquitous figures of William Hatteclyffe and Thomas Vaughan, had arrived in Bruges to progress the matter.2 One afternoon in mid-April, one of the envoys, a canon lawyer in his mid-thirties named John Russell, was pottering around the city’s booksellers. He picked up a copy of Cicero’s De Officiis, On Duties, one of the Roman philosopher’s most popular works. With its exemplary Latin style and advice on political behaviour, it was the kind of book that a man of Russell’s learning probably owned already. This volume, however, was different. With its illuminated initials and neat Roman script, it looked at first glance like the scribal manuscript that it was designed to resemble, but it wasn’t. The book had been printed in the German city of Mainz by Johann Fust who, some twelve years previously, had successfully sued his brilliant but impecunious partner Johannes Gutenberg for an unrecovered debt and, just as Gutenberg was about to go public with his new invention, walked off with his printing press as part-payment. Struck by the uniformity of the printing process – however painstakingly they were copied, no two manuscripts were ever exactly alike – Russell bought two copies.3
Despite the increasing diplomatic traffic between Edward and Charles, people in England still viewed the rumoured Anglo-Burgundian marriage as the usual horse-trading between princes. There was a vast gulf between discussing such spectacular marriages and bringing them to fruition, particularly given the massive amounts of finance needed to cover the festivities and the bride’s dowry. In this case, too, there were other obstacles: Charles’s equivocal attitude to the house of York; the papal dispensation needed for him to marry Edward’s sister – as second cousins, they were within the proscribed degrees of consanguinity – and the ongoing trade war with Burgundy. If the marriage were to proceed, somebody would have to make big concessions. As spring advanced, such concessions didn’t look likely. Edward seemed to be keeping his options open. So much so that the French king had convinced himself that, with Warwick’s help, he had finally managed to prise Edward away from an alliance with Burgundy.
As Louis outlined it excitedly to the hovering Milanese ambassador Panigarola, Warwick had brokered a ‘secret understanding’ between England and France. This understanding, moreover, was ambitious and wide-ranging: nothing less than a perpetual peace, in which – so Warwick’s agents told Louis – Edward had agreed to renounce the English crown’s historic claim to France. The two kings would henceforth be ‘brothers in arms’, united in a ‘war of extermination’ against Burgundy, which would see the Low Countries carved up between France and England. This treaty would also involve two Anglo-French marriages: Margaret of York would be paired off with Louis’ nephew, while Edward’s youngest brother Richard would be offered Louis’ second daughter Jeanne, then almost three years old. Edward’s other brother Clarence, though, was already spoken for. As Louis explained, he was ‘married to the daughter of the earl of Warwick’. In all this, Louis stressed, Edward and Warwick were of one mind. Indeed, Edward had given his personal commitment to the treaty, writing to Louis ‘in his own hand’: something, the French king said, that he had never done before.4
All of this was a direct contradiction of the Burgundian alliance that Edward had so earnestly come to desire; besides which, he was adamantly opposed to his brother Clarence marrying Warwick’s sister. Yet he seemed perfectly happy to let Warwick continue this conflicting agenda with France: so much so that he had put his own signature to the plans. It was a tactical move by the English king and his close advisers, one designed to keep the Burgundians keen. In this delicate, constantly shifting three-cornered relationship, nothing kept Charles of Charolais sweeter on Edward than the knowledge that Edward was making eyes at Louis. Nevertheless, the little touch of Edward had convinced Louis, constantly suspicious about English double-dealing, that he was serious about peace with France. It also persuaded Warwick. If in recent years Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s family had helped swing Edward’s affections towards Burgundy, Warwick was, he believed, finally tilting those affections back to what the earl saw as a much more advantageous settlement with France.
As Warwick prepared for a high-level diplomatic visit to Louis XI’s court for talks on the ‘perpetual peace’, Edward encouraged him. There was, it was true, a few weeks’ delay in processing the safe-conducts that Louis had sent through for Warwick’s mission, pushing back his departure date to the end of May – but it seemed innocent enough.
In London, amid the May Day merrymaking, Sir John Paston placed a bet with a friend of his, a mercer called Thomas Lomnour. The wager’s conditions were drawn up in a bill signed and sealed by both men. Lomnour had sold Paston ‘an ambling horse’. If the Anglo-Burgundian marriage took place within two years of the date of the bill, Paston would pay 6 marks for the horse; if not, the price would be the rather lower sum of 40 shillings ‘and no more’. The odds on the marriage taking place at all, Paston clearly thought, were long.5
On 18 May, having waited the best part of three weeks for storms in the Channel to abate, the Bastard of Burgundy’s heavily armed ships set sail for England. His party, carefully selected to play up the Woodvilles’ chivalric heritage, included some of Burgundy’s most illustrious knights: men like Duke Philip’s chamberlain Simon de Lalaing; Pedro Vasco de Saavedra, a Burgundian of Portuguese extraction who had fought Lord Rivers in a Smithfield joust some quarter-century previously; and Charles’s close servant Philippe de Bouton, who had originally answered Anthony Woodville’s challenge and who now wore the ‘flower of remembrance’ around his right bicep. With them was Charles’s own household chamberlain, Olivier de la Marche, a punctilious military man in his early forties, and an obsessively Anglophile councillor and bibliophile named Jean de Wavrin. Just over half a century before, the fifteen-year-old Wavrin had watched transfixed from the French camp at Agincourt as Henry V’s archers had obliterated the cream of French chivalry, an experience that convinced him thereafter to fight for the English. In his spare time, over the following decades, Wavrin had compiled a recueil, or collection of ‘chronicles and ancient histories of Britain, currently called England’, from Albion’s foundation in the mists of myth-history to the death of Henry IV. Now, in his sixties, Wavrin was visiting England for the very first time. It would give him the chance to bring his chronicle fully up to date.
After an eventful crossing in which they had fought off a pack of French pirates with guns and hand-to-hand fighting, the Burgundians sailed round the north Kent coast, passing a ‘fine town named Margate’, and up the Thames. At Greenwich, they were welcomed by John Tiptoft and representatives of London’s corporation, who escorted them into the city in a flotilla of gaudy barges. Disembarking at Billingsgate, they processed through the streets, past St Paul’s, to their lodgings.6
One of the first of the great houses west of the city, lying south of Fleet Street with gardens running down to the water’s edge, the bishop of Salisbury’s Inn was empty – Beauchamp was at that moment away in Bruges – and Edward had furnished it lavishly for his guests, as well as laying on ‘all manner of stuff in and without the town for his disport’. This included a training base, where the Bastard and his knights could practise away from the public gaze, at the bishop’s house at Chelsea, a short boat ride up the Thames. As it turned out, there was rather more to the choice of location.7
Shortly after the Burgundians’ arrival, on 28 May, Warwick left on his mission to the French court.8 The next day, the Bastard and his men were training at Chelsea when Edward arrived ‘secretly’, with a small group of companions headed by Hastings and the queen’s father Rivers – chief negotiators in his Burgundian talks – and the ubiquitous Thomas Montgomery. As wine and spices were served, Edward, Rivers and the Bastard huddled together in conversation. As much as a sporting visit, this was an informal summit meeting, one deliberately scheduled for the day after Warwick’s departure, away from prying eyes in the seclusion of Chelsea
.
As he pursued the Anglo-Burgundian alliance on which he had set his heart, Edward was well aware of Warwick’s loathing for the idea. He needed the earl and his meddling agents out of the way, and Warwick’s summit with Louis XI was the perfect diversion.9 With both eyes on his Burgundian prize, Edward seemed characteristically unbothered about what would happen when Warwick found out that, rather than the main event, his French trip was a sideshow. More than that, with Warwick safely off the scene, the king now moved against the man who, sitting at the heart of his administration, was proving a constant obstruction to his Burgundian ambitions: Warwick’s brother, Chancellor George Neville.
In the following days the tournament build-up began. With the flaring of trumpets, shawms and clarions sounding his approach, Edward and his entourage rode through a city packed for the jousts and a forthcoming parliament, towards Westminster. In front of him, bearing the sword of state, was Anthony Woodville. To the crowd’s delight, as they passed the bishop of Salisbury’s house, Woodville turned to the watching Burgundians, brandishing his sword furiously at the opponent whom he had been waiting two years to fight.10
At Westminster Palace the next day the Burgundians, honoured guests, accompanied Edward into the Painted Chamber for the opening of Parliament. The chancellor George Neville was absent: a stand-in delivered his sermon to the assembled Lords and Commons. He had still not appeared two days later, when Edward approved the Commons’ choice of speaker (the experienced financial administrator John Say, who as speaker in the previous Parliament had played a key role in raising taxes for Edward, was a shoo-in). In Neville’s place, the man who delivered the king’s reply to the Commons was Edward’s increasingly omnicompetent father-in-law, Rivers.11 Officially, Neville was unwell; unofficially, it seemed, he had been ordered to stay away.
The reason soon became clear. A few days later, on the morning of Monday 8 June, Edward and a dozen lords, including Hastings and Tiptoft, rode the short distance from Westminster to York Place, to the sprawling riverside mansion of the archbishop’s London home. Walking into Neville’s private apartments, Edward demanded that he give up the great seal, summarily dismissing him from the chancellorship that he had held since Edward and Warwick’s triumphant return to England from Calais in the summer of 1460.
George Neville had been one of the regime’s key architects, his value to Edward immense. But his record had been blotted by his failure to embrace the Burgundian vision so ardently desired by the king and his Woodville in-laws. He was no longer the future – a point made by the lords whom Edward had brought with him that morning. No fewer than five of those present had married into the queen’s family, including Warwick’s bête noire William Herbert and Edward’s household treasurer John Fogge. As a roster of the new Yorkist establishment, the presence of these men around Edward was as good a way as any to drive home to Neville that he was now firmly outside it.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Parliament was restive. In recent years, tensions had grown over what the Commons considered the king’s bad financial management. Like kings before him, Edward had repeatedly broken the unwritten compact that taxes were only to be raised for war or defence of the realm. Discontent over royal exactions, a major factor in the Lancastrian insurgencies of previous years, was helping drive an upsurge in lawlessness: ‘murders, riots, extortions, rapes of women, robbery and other crimes.’ On both his finances and law enforcement, the Commons informed Edward, he had to get his act together. The implication was that he was letting things slide.
Edward needed to make a big gesture. Enthroned, regal in his purple robes of state, he turned on the charm. Thanking the Commons effusively for their financial support during the first precarious years of his reign, he promised them that things would now be different. He would no longer ask for taxes for his ‘own pleasure’ – an implicit admission that up to now he had been doing precisely that – but would instead ‘live upon mine own’, from the income raised from his own lands and resources, except ‘in great and urgent causes’, when he would expect the Commons’ unequivocal financial backing.12
The speech had its desired effect, Speaker Say remarking greasily ‘how very pleasing’ the Commons had found it to be addressed by their king ‘with his own lips’. Whether or not the Commons were actually convinced was moot, given that monarchs regularly made loud pledges to live off their own financial resources before reneging on their word. But Edward had at least to look as though he was making an effort. Perhaps he genuinely believed that he could balance his books without resorting to taxation. Recently he had handed Rivers a new deal to ‘encourage him to continue’ in his post of treasurer – though his father-in-law presumably didn’t need much encouraging to accept a financial package worth an eye-watering £1,300 per annum – and Rivers continued to come up with the goods. Three days after his new deal was announced, he and his credit syndicate deposited another large loan of £6,833 6s 8d into Edward’s coffers.13 But more, much more, was needed. To show that he was serious about fiscal reform, Edward announced a parliamentary act of resumption.
He had already carried out two sweeping re-appropriations of royal grants, the most recent of which had come a couple of years previously, in order to reallocate resources to his family: especially to his Woodville in-laws and to his brother Clarence. Now, Edward protected the endowment he had bestowed on Clarence, exempting his brother’s massive portfolio of lands from the act of resumption. Clarence wasn’t the only one: also ringfenced were the grants of a raft of establishment figures, from Rivers and Anthony Woodville to William Herbert, Hastings and various other men close about the king and – naturally – Edward’s and Clarence’s youngest brother Richard. The Nevilles, however, were not exempted. Edward clawed back several estates from George Neville and the absent Warwick, a gesture whose meaning was unmistakeable. Edward, it said, was in charge. If Warwick and George Neville wanted to continue to benefit from his great favour, it was up to them to mould themselves to his desires, not the other way round. And what Edward desired most of all, at this moment in time, was his treaty with Burgundy.14
It was a hot summer. On the morning of 11 June crowds started arriving early at Smithfield for the long-awaited tournament.15 A space of some seventy by eighty yards had been transformed into a gladiatorial arena: the ground had been cleared and levelled, beaten flat by teams of men with mattocks, then covered in layers of sand and gravel and enclosed with fences and multi-storey timber stands, into which the spectators now filed. At either end were the two teams’ entrances and the pavilions to which the combatants would retire after each round, to be towelled down, get a few words of advice from their trainers, refresh and re-arm themselves. On Woodville’s blue pavilion, picked out in white antique lettering, was the slogan ‘La nonchalance’ – or, as the Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione put it some sixty years later, believing it was a ‘new word’, sprezzatura. This quality of effortlessness, in everything from love to battle, was the way for the ideal courtier to express his innate nobility. Nobody encapsulated it more than the poised Woodville – though, just to make sure everybody was aware that his nobility inhered in his blue blood as well as his personal virtue, his pavilion was also festooned with a string of forty-three banners tracing the ‘lineal pedigree of his descent’.
Around 9 a.m., after the king had appeared, hustled into the royal box through a side door to avoid the crowds, the two fighters who topped the bill made their entrances on horseback, circling the field to wild appreciation. Woodville appeared as England’s hero, his horse caparisoned in white cloth-of-gold embroidered with a St George cross of crimson velvet. Before him, his in-laws, foremost among them Clarence and the young duke of Buckingham, carried his helmets and weapons.16 Saluting the king, the combatants then retreated to their corners, the Bastard of Burgundy whipping up the crowd’s anticipation further by arming himself ‘openly’, in full view. As the atmosphere built to fever pitch, the two knights manoeuvred their horses into the lists.
The next round of fighting, with swords on horseback, was close and furious, a twisting mass of armour and horseflesh. As they hacked away at each other, the two horses collided violently. The Bastard’s horse reared high in agony, fell backwards and crashed to the ground, trapping its rider below it. As Woodville circled him triumphantly, holding his sword in the air, attendants rushed to free the prone Burgundian. The Bastard’s horse, bleeding profusely, staggered to its feet and lurched a few paces before collapsing, dead.
In the royal box, Edward’s agitated reaction spoke volumes about quite how much he wanted the Burgundian alliance. He berated Anthony Woodville who, all wide-eyed innocence, denied any foul play – though, whatever it was, it was hardly sprezzatura. Edward called off the rest of the day’s fighting. The Bastard, livid at the death of his favourite horse, was heard muttering something about Woodville having ‘fought a beast’ rather than a man. Overnight, tensions cooled and the diplomatic incident was smoothed over. Burgundian heralds refused to comment on speculation that the sliver of metal found in the dead horse’s throat was in fact a shard of the sword that Woodville had rammed down it: the whole thing, they soothed, was pure accident.18
During the remaining fighting, Edward was tense. Inspecting and rejecting some of the combatants’ weapons for being ‘right dangerous’ he sat, jittery, watching Woodville and the Bastard swing away at each other with axes. When, after warding off a frenzy of blows from his opponent, Woodville hit the Burgundian flush on the helmet, the king threw his white staff down, a signal to halt the fighting, and screamed at the pair to stop. They had to be forcibly pulled apart. The showpiece fight finally safely and honourably over, a relieved king commanded them to shake hands and ‘love together as brothers in arms’. That evening, the entente was restored at a banquet hosted by Edward and Elizabeth at the influential Mercers’ Company headquarters on Cheapside.