by Thomas Penn
Charles had been at Hesdin since August, monitoring the build-up of French troops in the Franco-Burgundian borderlands along the Somme. The new regime in England, headed by his nemesis Warwick, raised the prospect of an Anglo-French coalition against Burgundy. Fighting the French was difficult enough; fighting both England and France at the same time was all but impossible. Making Charles’s nightmare that little bit worse was the knowledge that his Yorkist brother-in-law was on the doorstep, seeking help to recover his kingdom.
As reports flooded in of Warwick and Clarence’s rapid progress through southern England, London had prepared its defences with a smoothness born of long practice. The city’s oligarchs hardly needed reminding of Warwick’s preternatural ability to spark into life smouldering popular resentment against hated elites, nor the threat to London posed by such resentment. News flooded in of uprisings in Kent, from where Jack Cade’s insurgency had exploded twenty years previously. The city’s levies were mustered, fortifications were checked, guns mounted and ammunition stockpiled; round-the-clock patrols watched from battlements and ‘by water’, and marched through the city’s streets. Mindful of rumours that Warwick’s supporters within the city – foremost among them the combative Sir Geoffrey Gate, who earlier that year had gone to ground after narrowly escaping Tiptoft’s executions – were trying to co-ordinate a prison break, the authorities also kept a sharp eye on gaols and sanctuaries, especially Westminster, whose cramped lanes housed fugitives of all kinds.4
The attacks came towards the end of September. Kentish insurgents looted, sacked and torched London’s eastern and southern suburbs, their chief targets the city’s Flemish neighbourhoods, which were ‘spoiled without mercy’. London’s security, though, held firm. Then, on Monday 1 October, as the corporation’s official journal tersely minuted, ‘it was published by civic authority that Edward IV, king of England, had fled.’ Any further attempt to hold out on his behalf was pointless. As it tried to beat back the Kentish mob on the city’s outskirts, the best the city corporation could hope for was an orderly handover of power to Warwick and Clarence.5
Holed up in the Tower, her husband gone, Elizabeth Woodville quickly sized up the situation. Eight months pregnant with her third child, she, her mother Jacquetta and two small daughters made the three-mile journey across the city to Westminster, where she took refuge. Scared that any show of resistance on the part of Yorkist defenders would result in her and her family being dragged out of sanctuary, Elizabeth ordered them to surrender the Tower in return for guarantees regarding her personal security. Londoners appreciated the queen’s decisiveness, which helped prevent the city being turned into a battleground; for some, it may have called to mind Jacquetta’s decisive intervention with Margaret of Anjou a decade previously. They also noted the studied calm with which Elizabeth dealt with the shock of her husband’s deposition and the personal danger she faced. Her private reaction was rather different: accounts filtered out of her ‘pain’, ‘anguish’ and ‘weeping’.6
The following Sunday, Warwick and Clarence rode into London at the head of their troops. With an anxious city looking to them to restore order, they issued proclamations forbidding any acts of violence and stressing the inviolability of the ‘holy places of sanctuary’ – including, first and foremost, Westminster.
The same day, Henry VI was hastily removed from his cell in the Tower – where, as one chronicler noted drily, Warwick had put him ‘rather a long time before’ – and installed in the lavish apartments recently vacated by Elizabeth. Henry’s former chancellor, the cultured bishop of Winchester, William Waynflete, was sent in to explain developments to the fragile Lancastrian king, who he found bewildered, dirty and ‘not worshipfully arrayed’.7
Washed, brushed and changed into something more regal, Henry was escorted through London’s streets by the new chief representatives of his regime – Clarence, Warwick, his brother George Neville, and John de Vere, earl of Oxford, together with ‘other lords, knights, esquires and gentlemen’ – to his new lodgings at the bishop of London’s palace. There, in a swiftly arranged ceremony, all his prerogative rights as king were restored to him. Some days later, on 10 October, Henry processed, crowned, to St Paul’s. The date would have been lost on no one. Ten years before, to the day, Richard duke of York had stormed into Westminster and laid claim to the English crown. Now, the sovereignty of the house of Lancaster was being re-established – and with it, as was soon apparent, the insoluble problem that had led to its overthrow in the first place.
As a shuffling Henry was led the short distance to the west door of St Paul’s – Westminster, apparently, was too much of a stretch – his physical frailty and mental instability were palpable. In the intervening decade he had become, if anything, more detached, more unearthly. One Londoner followed the standard Lancastrian line, explaining away Henry’s ‘ghostliness’ as ‘saintliness’; another delicately summed up the problem, observing that he was ‘no earthly Caesar’. The Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain put it more bluntly. The king was ‘ordered like a crowned calf’, his uncomprehending gaze taken by his handlers as assent. ‘And’, Chastellain added, the real ‘governor and dictator of the realm’ was Warwick, who ‘did everything’.8
Lancastrian advisers had been trying to solve the problem that was Henry for the best part of two decades. Foremost among them was Sir John Fortescue, whose propagandist skills had made him a bee in the Yorkist bonnet during the past years and who had helped mastermind Margaret’s spectacular return from the political wilderness. During the crisis-ridden 1450s, as he witnessed first-hand Henry’s slide into mental incapacity, Fortescue had developed a blueprint for governmental reform that attempted to counteract the unpredictable hazards of personal monarchy. Now, with Henry once again perched on the throne, Fortescue saw the chance to implement his plan.
That autumn, the sixteen-year-old Lancastrian heir Edward sent a letter from France to Warwick, his new father-in-law. It contained a series of instructions for government which, the boy wrote, Warwick could ‘show and communicate’ to Henry VI – and which, if Warwick thought useful for the ‘common good’, he could put into action. While Edward of Lancaster might have signed the letter, it had been written by his teacher Fortescue, and it contained an assortment of his key prescriptions.
Fortescue’s concerns about the existing system were those that had run like a seam through the various Yorkist manifestos of the 1450s and early 1460s and, later, through those of Warwick and Clarence: the profligacy and favouritism of kings, and their propensity for being led astray by the whisperings of malign courtiers. But Fortescue’s proposed solution to the problems that had ultimately plunged the country into civil war was very much his own. It involved the appointment of a council of twenty-four ‘wise and impartial’ men, twelve ‘spiritual’ and twelve secular, whose responsibility would be the ‘good politic rule of the land’. These councillors would deal with all issues regarding ‘the rule of the realm’, from legal and mercantile questions to the processing of petitions for royal favour and the granting of lands and offices. Their impartiality was crucial, for it had to be remembered how the ‘old council’ comprised mostly great lords who looked out for themselves and their ‘own matters’ rather than the common good. This new council would be to the king’s great benefit – and, moreover, to the benefit of those around him, ‘whom’, Fortescue hardly needed to point out, ‘the people have sometimes slain for the miscounselling of their sovereign lord’.
Although Fortescue’s prescriptions went out of their way to stress that this council was simply an advisory body – it would ‘in no thing’ restrain the king’s power – there was no mistaking his vision. The king, he stressed, should take no major policy decisions, do ‘no great thing’ without first consulting this council, whose recommendations he should then follow.
Given that Warwick was now leading a rickety coalition of deeply conflicted interests, Fortescue perhaps thought that this kind of council, specifically desi
gned to avoid faction and political rivalry, was an idea whose time had come. After all, Warwick had to show sceptics of all kinds that his government was a broad and non-partisan church. There were signs that he was anxious to do so: key posts went to a mixture of his own supporters (George Neville, naturally, got the chancellorship), Lancastrian servants and officers from Clarence’s own household.
Governing by consensus, though, went against Warwick’s restless energy and ambition, his constant hankering for a role – denied him by Edward – as the king’s chief executive officer. This, more or less, was the position he now took up. The deal struck at Angers made him both ‘regent’ and ‘governor’ on behalf of Henry VI and his heir. An unprecedented position of power, it combined the two roles that governing councils had historically been anxious to keep out of the hands of powerful nobles of the blood who claimed the title of protector: head of government and custodian, or tutela, of the king’s person. All of which was hardly inclined to convince sceptics that the restored regime would be anything other than a government run by and for the Nevilles. Those doubters, perhaps, had already started to include Clarence. For, if the duke had anticipated a role in running the kingdom, forming a duumvirate with Warwick, he was soon disappointed. It was to be the first of many such disappointments.9
One of Warwick’s first moves was to appoint John de Vere, earl of Oxford as constable of England. No sooner had Oxford been handed the post than, in an irony lost on no one, he convicted for treason his notorious predecessor as constable: John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, the man who had condemned Oxford’s own father and brother. Incongruously for this most remorseless of men, Tiptoft had been found hiding up a tree in Huntingdonshire disguised as a shepherd. Now, as one chronicler dispassionately put it, he ‘was judged by such law as he did to other men’. The fact that the new constable should never have been in charge of the process – whatever enormities Tiptoft had committed, they didn’t include treason – was neither here nor there. Everybody knew what was going on, and why, and what the outcome would be.
On 18 October Tiptoft was led to his death on Tower Hill through crowds gawping with appalled fascination at the man they knew as the ‘butcher of England’. An Italian priest at Tiptoft’s side, a black-habited Dominican, put it to him that his imminent execution was the result of his ‘unheard-of cruelties’, foremost among which was his execution of the earl of Desmond’s two young sons. If the priest’s suggestion was designed to offer Tiptoft an opportunity to confess his sins, the earl’s answer gave nothing away. Everything he had done, he replied impassively, was ‘for the State’.10
In sanctioning what was effectively a private act of revenge, perpetrated by one of his own brothers-in-law against another, Warwick underscored the seriousness of his commitment to the new order. He sent out writs for a new parliament, to be convened at Westminster on 26 November: an assembly whose purpose was formally to destroy the Yorkist claim to the throne, pronounce Edward a usurper and to restore prominent Lancastrians to political life and to their confiscated lands. Meanwhile, people were watching the actions of the new regime closely: from its backers, like Louis XI, to its enemies; from the exiled Lancastrians now preparing to return, to those who had benefited from the Yorkist regime and who feared they would be deprived of their gains; from smallholders to big financial players like London’s oligarchs, the wool merchants of Calais and the Medici, who had extended vast quantities of credit to Edward and who now, with his dethronement, despaired of making good on their loans. Warwick had his work cut out.
As Charles the Bold prepared his defences against the French onslaught that he feared was coming, one of his many concerns was the possibility of Warwick joining forces with Louis against him. An immediate anxiety was Calais, whose garrison, under the captaincy of Warwick’s associate Lord Wenlock – now showing his true political colours – was showing every sign of mobilizing. Eager to find common ground with the new regime in England, Charles felt he had a card to play.
Despite his familial ties with the house of York, Charles had never lost his instinctive Lancastrianism, and had continued to be in close and clandestine contact with several of Margaret of Anjou’s advisers.11 On 10 October, as Henry VI was being led round St Paul’s, Charles wrote an expansive letter to Wenlock at Calais, in which he pronounced himself overjoyed at the Lancastrian restoration: any friend and loyal subject of Henry’s, Charles stressed, was a friend of his. Two days later, amid reports that four thousand troops were being sent from England to bolster the Calais garrison, Charles dictated another, rather more insistent letter to Wenlock, adding a personally handwritten postscript for good measure. Invoking St George – who, he wrote, ‘knows me to be more English than the English’ – Charles insisted that all the treaties of friendship he had made with Edward had not in fact been made with one king or another in mind, but with the English crown, whichever head it happened to be resting on. As far as he was concerned, Charles added hopefully, those agreements were still in force. Then he came to the crunch: ‘the blood of Lancaster runs in my veins’. As the man to whom the Burgundian duke now entrusted delivery of his letter, an astute, sharp-eyed servant in his early twenties, pithily assessed, Charles was quite simply ‘scared’ of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.12
During the two years that he had served in the ducal household, Philippe de Commynes had grown close to Charles. Though self-confessedly ‘new to the sudden changes of this world’, Commynes was already experienced in high-level politics – though not in the kind of daunting mission on which Charles now sent him. What followed was a diplomatic baptism of fire for a man who would become one of the greatest political commentators of the age, and whose memoirs, infused with psychological insight and laced with slippery ambiguity, bear comparison with those of his younger Florentine contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli.13
As he rode towards the now aggressively anti-Burgundian Calais with an armed escort, Commynes encountered the first visible sign of trouble: a stream of Flemish locals fleeing the bands of armed Englishmen who now roamed the countryside around the Pale. Entering the enclave, he was struck by a new coolness towards him and his men. When he reached his lodgings, Commynes found pinned to the doors verses stating that Warwick and the French king Louis XI were an inseparable force. In case Commynes missed the point, the doors themselves had been daubed with white crosses: the badge of France. Commynes counted over a hundred of them.
Over dinner with Wenlock, Commynes remarked on the little golden ragged staff that Warwick’s deputy wore pinned to his hat. Wenlock, imperturbable, replied that when the news had arrived from England, everybody in Calais had immediately thrown away their Yorkist badges and replaced them with Warwick’s emblem. Apart from one Italian diplomat frightened out of his wits by the people ‘turning and shouting “Warwick”’, whom Wenlock had packed off to Bruges, everything had gone smoothly. The transformation, he told Commynes, had taken about fifteen minutes.
If Commynes was in any doubt about how quickly things could change, or the power of Warwick’s popularity in these parts, he had his answer. While Wenlock had over the years developed quite the reputation – he was, spat the Burgundian chronicler Chastellain, a ‘double and variable man’ who bent whichever way the wind blew – Commynes found him honest, realistic and plain-dealing. He was less sure about Wenlock’s men. Last time Commynes was in town, they had spoken glowingly of their king, Edward IV; now, they were violent in their hatred of him.14
Sticking to his brief, Commynes extracted an agreement from Wenlock that all existing Anglo-Burgundian treaties and alliances should remain in place, ‘except that we should insert Henry’s name instead of Edward’s’. And he remained bland in the face of relentless cross-questioning about the fate of the Yorkist king, and whether he was really alive. Edward, a poker-faced Commynes assured his hosts, ‘was dead’.
Nevertheless, as Charles the Bold continued his conciliatory approach – upbraiding Bruges’ officials for their over-hasty confiscation of
English goods; issuing proclamations throughout Flanders stating that any move against English interests would be punished; and sending a Burgundian embassy to London – he was under no illusions about the corner in which he now found himself. Neither was Commynes. As he noted flatly, if Charles had to go to war with both England and France at the same time, ‘he would be destroyed’. The only hope for Charles, he wrote, was to ‘sweeten Monsieur de Warwick’ as far as he could, and to try to preserve commercial relations between the two countries: after all, conflict was incredibly bad for business, and the merchants of London and Calais wanted it no more than Charles did. Realistically, though, there was a sense of the inevitable being delayed. Wenlock would soon find out that Commynes had been lying about Edward’s death. Charles’s protestations of his Lancastrianism had bought himself time, that was all.15
As Commynes rode towards Calais, Charles dispatched two trusted servants to Edward and his group of refugees at The Hague; liaison officers who would stay with the Yorkist exiles and, at the same time, keep a close eye on their activities. At the start of November, Charles authorized a monthly pension for Edward of 500 ecus, backdated to 11 October. Not only, however, was the cash paid in arrears – by the time Edward had acknowledged the first instalment, scrawling an ‘Edward R’ at the bottom of the receipt, it was early December – it wasn’t an awful lot.16