The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  While Warwick and Clarence commanded strong support on the streets, there was a rather more sceptical mood in the council chamber. Alarmed by the extreme violence of recent weeks, councillors instinctively loyal to the status quo and the rule of law were also perplexed about the two lords’ motives. Having claimed to want to reform government, Warwick and Clarence had then locked the king up. Not only was it unclear on whose authority they were now acting, but they were struggling to control the popular energies they had unleashed against the regime. Disorder spread with news of Edward’s imprisonment as people took the law into their own hands. Across the country, local vendettas blazed into life: insurgency spread unchecked in the northeast; in London, an epidemic of rioting and looting spread through the city.

  Warwick and Clarence struggled to restore order. When they tried to raise troops, people ignored them, knowing perfectly well the orders hadn’t come from Edward. In London, the mayor read out a letter from Charles the Bold, urging citizens to remain loyal to Edward. It was a message that now carried some weight given that Charles, with happy timing, had finally lifted the detested trade embargo on English cloth just weeks before. For Charles, the prospect of Warwick gaining power was worrying. England’s elites agreed. Whether or not there was a case for reform, Warwick and Clarence’s bid to control the government was met with a general shaking of heads: ‘everyone’, wrote Dalleghiexia, ‘is of the opinion that it would be better not’.15 The two lords bowed to the inevitable.

  At Middleham Castle, sometime in early September, a month or so after his capture, Edward ‘found his freedom’: as if, somehow, all the doors had been quietly opened. He rode unhurriedly to York, hunting as he went. His appearance there was galvanizing. The troops that Warwick had found it so hard to mobilize were now raised and the northern insurgency extinguished, its leaders captured and executed. Progressing south, the king was joined by his loyal noblemen: men like his uncle Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex; Hastings, unswerving as ever; and Warwick’s brother John Neville, earl of Northumberland, who – whether or not he had been tempted to join the rebel lords – had remained faithful to Edward. Among them, too, was the king’s youngest brother Richard.16

  In mid-October Edward rode into London to an extravagant corporate welcome. Holding court at the bishop of London’s palace the king seemed his usual expansive self, back at the centre of his universe, order restored. According to Sir John Paston, he had nothing but ‘good language’ for Clarence, Warwick, George Neville and the earl of Oxford, ‘saying that they be his best friends’. However, Paston added meaningfully, the king’s household men ‘have other language’; in the privacy of the royal apartments, among Edward’s closest servants, the animosity ran deep.

  Nobody mentioned the reaction of Queen Elizabeth. She had emerged from the terrifying ordeal of the previous months, along with her surviving relatives, to resume her place at Edward’s side, doubtless as poised as ever. In any case, she kept her head down, and her thoughts on Warwick’s and Clarence’s attempt to exterminate her family to herself.

  There was, too, an edge to Edward’s own conciliation. When George Neville and Oxford set out eagerly for court, his response was sharp: ‘they should come when he sent for them’, and not before.17

  Whatever the private hatreds, a process of reconciliation was urgently needed. With the government and country destabilized and continued ‘murmuring and doubtfulness’ over Edward’s ability to rule, the king’s council stressed to him the overriding importance of resolving this ‘deadly division’ and restoring some semblance of unity. As Edward mobilized forces to deal with the aftershocks of the insurgency, representatives shuttled between the king and the rebel lords. Whether either side had any real appetite for peace remained to be seen, but for the sake of his kingdom, Edward had to try.18 As talks continued, he set about rearranging his battered and bloodied government. Casting around for loyal, reliable noblemen, he settled on his youngest brother Richard, now seventeen years old.

  Since the beginning of the year, Edward and Richard had spent prolonged periods in each other’s company: during the trials of Lancastrian rebels in January; on progress through East Anglia, before the disaster of Edgecote; and that autumn, following Edward’s release from captivity, when Richard had been quickly at his brother’s side. Where Clarence had been found horribly lacking, Edward now reached for his other brother, in whose loyalty, ability and shared blood he found he could trust. Thanks to Clarence’s volatility, Richard was now transformed in the king’s eyes: no longer an afterthought, but a cornerstone of the reconstituted Yorkist regime, a royal duke deserving of power. Accordingly, Edward handed him the crucial role of constable of England.

  In giving Richard the constableship, a role that carried with it the quasi-regal power to try and convict people for treason, Edward passed over two other candidates for this most politically delicate of posts: John Tiptoft, still away in Ireland; and Anthony Woodville, in theory entitled to the office that had been previously held by his father Rivers – though his appointment would hardly have helped engender a new spirit of conciliation. Richard, untainted by the rivalries of recent years, was a fresh start. Besides which, he clearly wanted the job.19

  Richard’s education had prepared him well. He was a keen student, constantly returning to the books that he kept by him, poring over the precepts laid out in staple texts like Egidio Colonna’s De Regimine Principum, On the Government of Princes – his copy of which was especially dear to him, having previously belonged to his father. There was, indeed, something unbending in Richard’s attitude to princely virtues and the zeal with which he sought to give them expression. In a directive to the officers of arms over which, as constable, he had jurisdiction, his language had a moralistic clarity. Heralds were to avoid ‘openly slandered and defamed places and persons’; they were also to report to their superiors any colleagues who, they heard, had indulged in ‘ungodly demeanour or slandering ways’: the culprits would have to answer for their behaviour before Richard himself, and to accept ‘punishment according to their deserts’.20

  A certain inflexibility in Richard was hardly surprising. After all, he had barely known a time when England hadn’t been at war with itself. For him, the binding forces of loyalty and obedience to the law, and the enforcement of the king’s justice, were of supreme importance. Earlier that year, as judge in the treason trials of Hungerford and Courtenay, he had unblinkingly handed down the harshest of sentences. Now, he embraced the constable’s judicial role.21

  Richard’s palpable commitment to the king’s laws made him an ideal candidate to plug one of the gaping holes left by that summer’s violence. In Wales, Herbert’s beheading had been followed by an immediate upsurge in disorder. Edward needed somebody to reimpose control in the region, and Herbert’s son, at barely fifteen, was hardly in a position to do so. Instead, Edward gave Richard the task of imposing control on the principality: stamping out rebellion and sedition, enforcing the law and wielding his power on the king’s behalf. Richard had little local knowledge and barely any connections of his own – but, Edward judged, he had enough about him. In November, Richard left for Wales in the company of Herbert’s brother-in-law William Devereux, Lord Ferrers, a hard Marcher lord who had fought at Mortimer’s Cross.

  After Herbert’s beheading, Devereux had placed his Herefordshire manor of Weobley at the disposal of Herbert’s widow, Anne, along with her daughters and one of their Lancastrian wards, the twelve-year-old Henry Tudor. The other Herbert ward, Henry Percy, was in the Tower, where Warwick had put him that summer. Aged twenty, he was on the brink of his majority. The Nevilles needed no reminding of the threat posed to their northern hegemony by this great Lancastrian claimant to the earldom of Northumberland.22 Neither did Edward.

  That autumn, as his search for a compromise with Warwick and Clarence continued, the king made fresh moves against Neville interests. Years before, Edward himself had built up the edifice of Neville power in the northeast: power that Warwi
ck had then used to bring his regime to the brink of destruction. So, Edward decided to knock it down. His wrecking ball was Henry Percy.

  Late that October, in a small chamber in Westminster Palace, Henry Percy swore an oath of allegiance to Edward, witnessed by a small knot of royal councillors including William Hastings and the archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Bourchier. In return, Percy was given his liberty. His release was seismic. Percy, everybody now knew, was to be restored to his earldom of Northumberland – with inevitable consequences for those who had profited from it: Warwick, Clarence and the earldom’s current incumbent, John Neville.

  Yet in removing John Neville from Northumberland, the king was breaking up one of the few pieces of his government that worked. Over the years, John Neville had been an exceptionally effective leader of counter-insurgency operations; not only that, but through the previous summer’s upheavals he had remained loyal to Edward. Edward wanted John Neville to know that his future with the house of York was assured. The compensation package he received for the loss of his Northumberland earldom was correspondingly munificent: a new powerbase in the southwest, including a portfolio of lands previously belonging to the earls of Devon, and the title of marquess of Montagu. There was another, spectacular, bonus. Granting John Neville’s small son George the royal dukedom of Bedford – a signal honour: the last magnate to hold the title had been Henry V’s brother – Edward betrothed the boy to his oldest daughter Elizabeth. Binding the only male Neville heir into the new Yorkist line was a match that might one day see him on the throne of England. For John Neville, his northern identity bound up with the earldom that he had long desired and cherished, it was a wrench. But he seemed to accept it.23

  So too did Warwick and Clarence. That December, after weeks of negotiations, the pair finally accepted Edward’s guarantees for their security, arriving in Westminster with a ‘slender crew’ of soldiers. In the days that followed, Edward and the two lords were locked in ‘long talk’, shepherded along by the council. Over Christmas, residual antagonism gave way to seasonal goodwill. At a ceremony in the parliament chamber, Edward received Warwick and Clarence back into his grace ‘and it was agreed that all disagreement should be abandoned’. Shortly after Epiphany, the reconciled lords left London.24

  Away in France, news of the reconciliation sent Louis XI into a paroxysm of nervous rage. That February, in an audience with the Milanese ambassador Bettini, he had stamped about yelling that the English and Burgundians were coming – although, Bettini added, there wasn’t much evidence to suggest an invasion was imminent. In any case, Edward had his hands full elsewhere.25

  Through the last months of 1469 a newly alert Edward had sought to clamp down on further outbursts of regional violence, the kind of turf wars and grudges that, as Edward knew to his cost, had a habit of spiralling out of control – especially when given a helping hand by powerful noblemen with their own political agendas. The unrest in Yorkshire had spread south to Lincolnshire, where local law enforcement was overwhelmed by ‘insurrections of the people’. One such riot came at the river port of Gainsborough, where a group of raiders ransacked and trashed the house of one of the region’s big men, Sir Thomas Burgh, making off with ‘all the goods and chattels that they might find’. Burgh was one of Edward’s household knights, his master of horse, and a member of the king’s council: the crown’s eyes and ears in the region. The destruction of Burgh’s house, on which he had lavished money, was more than just an attack on his wealth and power; it was an attack on royal authority that resonated at the heart of government.26

  The raiders were led by Richard, Lord Welles, a Lancastrian whose father had died at Towton, and whose former pre-eminence in the region had been eclipsed by the arriviste Burgh. The feud between the two men had been simmering for years: Welles’s attack on Gainsborough took it up a level.27 With him was his son Sir Robert, and his two brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Dymmock and the Gascon knight Sir Thomas Delalaunde, themselves both holders of royal office: Delalaunde, a fine jouster, had distinguished himself fighting alongside Anthony Woodville in the Smithfield jousts two years previously. The attack on Gainsborough, moreover, sparked wider popular unrest. Burgh, who had done little to endear himself to the locals, was forced to flee the region. When Edward summoned the ringleaders to explain themselves, they refused to appear with the usual confection of excuses – Lord Welles pleading both ‘want of health’ and ‘other business’.28

  Throughout the first weeks of 1470 the Lincolnshire disturbances escalated. Early in February, Edward convened a council meeting in Westminster to discuss the security situation; both Warwick and Clarence were ordered to attend. Clarence didn’t turn up. Warwick arrived in London to an unsettling reception. Overnight, anonymous bills had been posted across the city with lurid allegations about the two lords’ continued sedition: Clarence’s absence, it was said, could only be explained by the fact that he was away plotting against his brother the king.29 Warwick took the hint, and swung into line.

  With the previous summer’s riots in Yorkshire constantly in mind, Edward and his council decided that the situation in Lincolnshire was serious enough to warrant royal judicial intervention. As Edward drew up plans to lead a force of men into the county ‘for the suppression of our rebels and enemies’, Warwick offered military aid, which Edward accepted. In another moment of reconciliation, Warwick was present when a commission investigating the virulent allegations of witchcraft brought against Edward’s mother-in-law Jacquetta by Warwick’s retainer Thomas Wake, reported its findings to the king’s council. Jacquetta was cleared of all charges. As the council put her innocence on record, Warwick’s demeanour was doubtless as unreadable as ever.30

  Towards the end of February Warwick left London to mobilize troops for Edward’s army. Before he set out, Edward appointed his ‘gests’, or stages of march, and confirmed with him ‘the number of people he would come with to the king’. For a king to plan a campaign closely with his leading nobles was normal practice. But context was everything. Edward wanted to know precisely where Warwick would be at any given time, and who he was bringing with him. While he might have welcomed Warwick back into favour, Edward was watching him.31

  Around this time, Sir John Paston wrote from London to his younger brother with his usual mixture of gossip, business and high politics: pointing him towards a young lady who was ‘full of love’; promising him a delivery of oranges; and wonderingly describing the arrival at court of a Turkish dwarf – considerably smaller than the king’s other dwarves, but with sons as tall as Edward himself. ‘And’, Paston added in awed tones, ‘it is reported that his penis is the size of his leg.’ Then, amid the fraternal ribaldry, he was suddenly sober. The king’s imminent expedition to Lincolnshire, he wrote, had people worried. Talk was that Edward had assembled a vast army – the duke of Norfolk alone was said to have raised ten thousand troops – and was going to make an example of the Lincolnshire commons. The announcement that Warwick was going with Edward prompted further concern. ‘Some men say his going shall do good’, Paston hedged, ‘and some say it doth harm.’

  In Lincolnshire, there was growing anxiety. Royal commissions of the kind Edward was planning had a bloody history, and people had long memories. Such campaigns often did more harm than good; sometimes, they fuelled further trouble. Back in 1450 Jack Cade’s Kentish rebellion was driven by fears that Henry VI, seeking retribution for the murder of his leading adviser the duke of Suffolk, was coming to devastate the county and turn it into a ‘wild forest’. To any interested party, in Lincolnshire that winter the conditions for continued insurgency seemed perfect.32

  Around Candlemas, the light-filled festival of renewal that alleviated the darkness of early February, two men of sober, clerical demeanour turned up unannounced at the Welles family home. The senior of the two, a man called John Barnby, brought with him letters of credence that he handed to Lord Welles. Barnby was Clarence’s chaplain. The letters, from Clarence himself, were to guarantee that Barnb
y was who he said he was, and that he could be trusted. The message Barnby carried from Clarence to Welles was verbal, memorized: too explosive to be committed to paper.

  Clarence had property interests in Lincolnshire. They weren’t extensive but, combined with his royal status, enough to appeal to disaffected families like that of Lord Welles. Barnby reassured Welles and his son that Clarence and Warwick were assembling military support ‘for their surety’; in return, the two lords needed their support. They should be prepared to raise all the men they could and try to incite an uprising among the commons whenever Clarence sent word. But, Barnby stressed, Welles and his son should not do anything yet: Warwick was still in London with the king, and it was imperative that they ‘tarry and not stir’ until he left, in case Edward worked out what was going on.

  If the account of Barnby’s visit was to be believed, Clarence and Warwick’s newfound reconciliation with the king was nothing of the sort. And Warwick’s proposed contribution to the royal army going into Lincolnshire masked another aim altogether.33

  Lord Welles and his brother-in-law Dymmock, though, were cautious. Whatever their sympathies, they decided to clear the air with Edward. Belatedly responding to the king’s summons, they made their long-delayed journey to London. Sir Robert Welles stayed behind in Lincolnshire and, encouraged by Warwick and Clarence, decided to make himself a popular hero.

  On Sunday 4 March, proclamations in Sir Robert Welles’s name were read out in churches across the county, to packed, fearful congregations. With Edward widely believed to be coming to the region with the intention of ‘destroying the commons’, Sir Robert called upon the people, in the name of the king, ‘the duke and the earl’ – Clarence and Warwick – to arm themselves and muster two days later, in order ‘to resist the king’. Quite which king the commons were supposed to be supporting was left unclear. There was however no doubting the identity of the king they were opposing: Edward.