The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Trying to keep all his options open, Charles was faced with a dizzying exercise in plate-spinning. In the account book that itemized his first payment to Edward was also listed the latest payment to the Lancastrian dukes of Somerset and Exeter, now serving in Charles’s army against the French. At the same time, his envoys were desperately trying to establish diplomatic relations with Warwick’s regime. Just as his father had done with the young Clarence and Richard ten years previously, Charles kept Edward at a distance from the Burgundian court, at Louis of Gruuthuse’s house in The Hague. Nor was there any mention of helping Edward regain his kingdom. Unsurprisingly, the modest pension Charles gave his brother-in-law suggested he was playing Edward’s royal status down. The money was, as the ducal treasurer stipulated in his accounts, solely for Edward to ‘maintain his estate’ – and nothing more.17

  Having arrived in Holland with little more than the clothes on their backs, Edward and his men were, apart from Charles’s parsimonious allowance, almost entirely dependent on Gruuthuse’s generosity. Together with William Hastings and a small clutch of nobles and knights, there were about eighty exiles comprising an assortment of royal servants, like the signet clerk Nicholas Harpisfield and the duchy of Lancaster official Nicholas Leventhorpe, and hangers-on like the Bristol gentleman and alchemist Thomas Norton. In mid-October, they were bolstered by a group of Calais deserters – shooed on to The Hague as quickly as possible by Charles – and by Richard. Coming ashore some 150 miles to the south, Richard and Anthony Woodville had found a sympathetic welcome: in Middelburg, the city’s burghers had hosted a wine reception for them, and they had been loaned cash in the nearby port of Veere. Now, as they joined forces with Edward, his already slender resources were further stretched. Their meals consisted mostly of variations on rabbit – which, on the plus side, meant there were no temptations for Edward to resist.18

  Adversity seemed to bring out the best in Edward, and his natural instinct for breaking through barriers of social rank to form intense bonds with the men around him. The crisis he faced seemed to absorb those obsessive drives that in quieter, more aimless times found release in his bingeing and womanizing. As Edward well knew, he could not risk his Burgundian exile becoming an established fact. It had happened to Margaret of Anjou’s court at Koeur: resourceless and isolated, it had become an irrelevance, until the impossible had happened. As the days and weeks went by, people would become resigned to the idea of Lancastrian rule in England; Edward’s own men would start to drift away. A few, in fact, had already deserted him, getting into a fight with some locals in a Bruges pub on their way to join Wenlock in Calais.

  Whatever Charles the Bold thought, Edward had to start planning his return immediately, testing the visible fault-lines in the Lancastrian regime. As autumn deepened into winter, Edward’s agents were already at work, crossing into England, sounding out allegiances.

  Late in November 1470, Parliament opened at Westminster with a sermon from George Neville, who had slipped smoothly back into the chancellorship. Without apparent irony, he took as his text a verse from Jeremiah, ‘Return, you backsliding children’, urging all those who had fallen into the error of backing Edward to make their peace with the house of Lancaster; the political door, apparently, remained open.19

  For all that Warwick’s regime attempted to tread delicately through the thickets of competing interests in drawing up a new national settlement, the resulting compromises satisfied few. The most prominent case was Clarence. The previous summer in Angers, he had been confirmed in the Lancastrian line of succession. It was an agreement that put various noses out of joint – especially those of the Beaufort family, whose claims to the throne he had leapfrogged. With the Beauforts (among others) breathing down his neck, Clarence started to feel that the insecurity of his brother’s rule was small beer compared to the situation in which he now found himself.

  Meanwhile, one subject that went conspicuously unmentioned in Parliament was the matter that was rapidly becoming Warwick’s biggest problem: the war against Charles the Bold that the French king was now pressurizing him to join. Louis XI’s agents – headed by the ubiquitous Monypenny – had arrived in London just as Parliament opened. They had been closely briefed, right down to the opening pleasantries. Warwick was to be referred to as Louis’ ‘best friend’, underscoring a sense of shared commitment and, now, obligation. Warwick, ‘for many reasons’, owed him.

  Monypenny quickly cut to the chase. Louis was keen to invoke the secret deal at the heart of the Angers treaty: a ‘special relationship’ between England and France, focusing on a war dedicated to the total annihilation of the house of Burgundy. Louis’ agents laid out three options for a joint Anglo-French offensive: Warwick could choose whichever he liked. Louis was also happy to discuss how the conquered Burgundian lands would be partitioned between England and France. Above all, the French agents confirmed, Louis was now placing ‘everything’ in Warwick’s hands. Warwick should supply and pay for an English army, and confirm a starting date for the campaign, as soon as possible. The one thing that Louis ‘did not desire’ was any dithering on Warwick’s part.20

  The previous summer, Warwick had been desperate enough to sign up to whatever Louis wanted. Now, it turned out, he had got a very bad deal. Aggression against Burgundy in the form of piracy – something Warwick had proved good at over the years – was one thing. A full-scale war, which needed unified political commitment from the nobility and Parliament, was of a different order of magnitude. The earl was facing an uphill struggle convincing even his allies of the viability of his regime. Those to whom he looked for credit – English merchants in London and Calais – categorically did not want a war with their biggest trading partner. Moreover, having taken Edward to task for his exorbitant tax demands, there was no way Warwick could approach Parliament for funds without risking significant public opprobrium. He didn’t even ask.

  In London, below the flimsy veneer of business-as-usual, the mood was wary. The streets crackled with disorder; a night watch of three hundred armed men patrolled the city’s wards; the entrances to Westminster sanctuary, filled with Edward’s supporters, were kept under heavy guard. There, on 2 November, Elizabeth Woodville gave birth to a baby boy, an heir to Edward’s throne. Christened in Westminster Abbey, he was named after his absent father.

  The city’s oligarchs, meanwhile, kept their thoughts to themselves and their heads down. The vengeful draper Sir Thomas Cook, now restored to favour, was on the prowl, going after those who he knew ‘bore favour unto King Edward’. In the Guildhall, the common council’s regular meetings were perfunctory, at least as far as the official minute-book was concerned: tellingly, little formal discussion was noted at all. Although it acknowledged the new regime, the city corporation’s true attitude lay in the extent of its loans – or lack of them. It had handed Warwick £1,000 towards the defence of Calais: safeguarding the country’s economic interests was, of course, a priority. That was more or less that, apart from £100 granted to Warwick himself, which in the circumstances was little more than pocket money. Whatever ordinary Londoners thought of the earl, those who ran the city kept their mouths, and their purses, shut.

  In France, Louis quickly grew impatient. Not bothering to wait for Warwick, he unilaterally declared war on Burgundy.21 And that, as far as Charles the Bold and Edward were concerned, changed everything.

  That December, French troops advanced rapidly into the Burgundian borderlands of Picardy, taking the Somme town of St Quentin and menacing Amiens. For Charles the Bold, the time for equivocation was over: mobilizing his forces, he embargoed all trade with Lancastrian England. On Christmas Day, Calais shut its gates and didn’t reopen them. Unable to do business, the Staple merchants started to haemorrhage money; away in London, the situation was no better, with ships stranded in port and warehouses stuffed with unsellable goods.22 For England’s businessmen, the outbreak of hostilities was catastrophic. For Edward, it was a godsend.

  Now that he was fa
cing an existential threat to his dominions, Charles finally had to be decisive. The best way to alleviate pressure on Burgundy was for Edward to regain his crown; Louis XI hardly possessed the resources to fight both England and Burgundy at once. Doubtless encouraged by some persuasive words from his wife, Edward’s sister Margaret, Charles decided the time had come to rediscover his Yorkist side and embrace his English brother-in-law.

  On Christmas Day, Edward, Richard and Louis de Gruuthuse, accompanied by a small group of Edward’s closest followers, started on the two-hundred-mile journey south from The Hague to the town of Aire, south of Calais, where Edward and Charles were due to meet face-to-face for the first time. Arriving first, on 1 January 1471, the Yorkists were met by a ducal envoy bearing the news for which they had been hoping for months: Charles had signed off a massive loan of £20,000 to Edward, now unequivocally styled ‘King of England’. As the duke’s treasurer noted in his account book, the sum was explicitly intended to help Edward and his brother Richard ‘to return to the kingdom of England’.23

  At a stroke, Edward’s prospects had been transformed. No longer the unwanted poor relation whose presence had so alarmed and embarrassed Charles, his aims and those of his brother-in-law now cohered exactly: to remove the Lancastrian regime from power as fast as possible. Edward had come in from the cold.

  When Charles arrived the following day, the two men embraced warmly. Among the cluster of ducal attendants was Philippe de Commynes, who – not a man to lavish unnecessary praise – was transfixed by Edward’s sheer magnetism. Seeing the English king in person for the first time, he seemed unable to tear his gaze away: Edward was, he recalled, ‘the most beautiful prince my eyes ever beheld’. In fact, he added, he had never seen a ‘more handsome prince’ than Edward was at that moment, ‘when my lord of Warwick forced him to flee from England’.24 Crises, Commynes suggested, became him.

  Edward had barely started talking before Charles cut in, offering whatever finance and military backing he needed. Charles’s wholehearted identification with Edward’s cause had the zeal of a convert; it even extended to tackling his own split loyalties once and for all. In the following days, the pair headed south towards the front line with France and the town of St Pol. Awaiting them there were the two exiled Lancastrian noblemen whom Charles had been sheltering: Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and Henry Holland, duke of Exeter. Rather than dismissing his former allies out of hand, Charles – careful to keep his new Yorkist friends well apart from their bitter enemies – settled down to chat with them.

  Just possibly, Charles surmised, there was the chance of outdoing Louis’ efforts at Angers the previous year and brokering an agreement between Edward and the Beaufort family. After all, if Somerset detested Edward, he also hated Warwick – a hatred that the new settlement in England, the Beauforts cut out of the Lancastrian succession in favour of Clarence and his heirs, had done little to dispel. But at St Pol, the impossibility of any reconciliation quickly became apparent, the Lancastrians emphatically restating their opposition to Edward and their loyalty to Henry VI.

  As negotiations with the two Lancastrian nobles disintegrated, Charles moved to plan B. He told the pair that if they wouldn’t come to terms with Edward, they would have to leave Flanders, their intermittent place of refuge for the previous six years. That Charles and Edward were prepared to risk the two lords going back to England spoke volumes. Around that time, another returning Lancastrian exile, the earl of Ormond, received a letter from his son urging him to set aside the implacable ‘loathing and hatred’ he had for Warwick and Clarence. If Somerset and Exeter went back to England in anything like the same frame of mind, Edward and Charles probably reasoned, their disruptive presence at Henry VI’s court might prove a distinct asset to Edward’s cause.25

  Following the Lancastrians’ departure, Edward and Charles talked through the night, stressing their common bonds of brotherhood and chivalry. As far as his own plans were concerned, Edward said, things looked good: he was receiving excellent intelligence from reliable sources in England.26 Speed, however, was vital. It was crucial to return before Margaret of Anjou and her son arrived in England – that December, storms in the Channel had already forced them to abandon one crossing – and the Lancastrian regime, now some three months old, started to become a fact on the ground.

  While Edward was constitutionally inclined to play up his own chances, he had reasons to be bullish. From their places of hiding, Edward’s supporters in London had managed to evade Warwick’s surveillance and establish contact with the exiles ‘by the most covert means that they could’, with updates on the political situation. Discouraging news – the general hostility of the commons – was offset by the more positive demeanour of the city’s elites, who, whatever they thought of Edward, thought worse of Warwick.27

  Meanwhile, Edward’s men were probing loyalties elsewhere in England, with reasonably encouraging results. Among them was the chamber servant Nicholas Leventhorpe, sent clandestinely into his native northeast to make contact with Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. While Percy’s instincts were Lancastrian, Edward had restored him to his earldom the previous year: a decision that at the time looked a disastrous misjudgement but which now, with Percy’s great rivals the Nevilles in power, might pay dividends. Leventhorpe had made landfall easily enough, evading local security, but his return journey had been problematic. With his ship impounded by suspicious port authorities and the northeastern ports on high alert, he had journeyed 150 miles north, across the Scottish border to Dundee. There, after five days trying and failing to put to sea in an inadequately rigged Dutch fishing boat, he forked out £4 on a fast and much more dextrous caravel that could go ‘high in the wind’. Finally making it back to Middelburg, Leventhorpe brought positive news and, with him, evidence of Yorkist support in the region: a servant of the formidable Yorkshire knight Sir Ralph Ashton.28

  All such intelligence, however, remained speculative. Until Edward set foot in England, he had no way of knowing whether anybody planned to keep their promises. And to make that happen, he had his work cut out to raise loans, mercenaries, materiel and supplies, and the ships that would transport them across the North Sea. On 10 January, he and Charles parted. Charles returned to the front, to oversee his defensive campaign against the French. Edward headed northeast, for the Low Countries’ political and financial heart: Bruges.29

  After Paris and Ghent, Bruges was the third largest city in northern Europe and one of its great entrepôts, ringed and interwoven by canals, the arteries that connected it to its North Sea outport of Damme and from there to the world. At its core lay the vast marketplace, dominated by its belfry and cloth hall and a giant crane in constant motion, loading and unloading goods from the boats on to the Spiegelrei, children slogging round its twin treadwheels. Running north from the square, the heaving thoroughfare of Vlamingstraat opened out into a smaller place that took its name from a large, foursquare building that stood in one corner. One of many multi-purpose hofs that provided lodgings, kitchens, financial services, warehouses, places of business and entertainment – or ‘cabaret’, as one such hostel described itself – the Beurse was named after its owners, the family of van der Beurse, whose coat-of-arms, three purses, was carved in stone above the door. Over time, the building’s name had become synonymous with the business carried on inside it: in the years and centuries to come, the Bourse would lend its name to financial exchanges the world over. On the same square were the Genoese and Florentine consulates and, in the surrounding streets, the other ‘nations’ or resident merchant communities: the Hanse kontor, the extravagant Medici residence of Hof Bladelin and, east of the Crane, the ‘English Street’, with its own dedicated weigh house. An impecunious English king, trying to raise money and resources to reinvade his own country, could hardly have found himself in a better place.30

  Along with the other cities and towns strung along the Flanders coastline, though, Bruges had been on edge for months. Anxieties were height
ened by intermittent reports of Warwick’s menacing fleet, commanded by his illegitimate cousin Thomas ‘the Bastard’ of Fauconberg, which attacked and looted ships irrespective of nationality. On 13 January, Edward and his men rode into a city on constant, agitated alert. Processions of clergy, praying for the safety of Bruges and Flanders, paced through the streets, intersecting with round-the-clock patrols. There, Edward was welcomed by the man who had been a reassuring presence at his side since arriving in the Low Countries three months previously, Louis of Gruuthuse.31

  In the shadow of the Church of Our Lady, its bell-tower spiking the sky, Gruuthuse’s Bruges townhouse would be Edward’s base in the weeks to come. Gathered intimately round a central courtyard, the elegant brickwork and mullioned windows of its buildings exuded an urbane sophistication; inside, its tapestry-lined galleries were saturated with the culture of the Burgundian dukes. A constant refrain – painted on walls and ceilings, worked into the great ornamented fireplaces – was Gruuthuse’s motto, ‘plus est en vous’: nobility and virtue, he believed, were to be found within.

  In the exquisite comfort of Gruuthuse’s home, Edward found much that was familiar. In recent years, his embrace of all things Burgundian had extended to investing heavily in its culture. While Edward yielded nothing to Charles the Bold in the small fortune he had spent on Burgundian tapestries – some £2,500 in 1467 alone on several sets of arras, including a nine-piece History of Alexander – there was nothing to indicate he had ever before come into contact with a library quite like Gruuthuse’s: a collection second only to that of the dukes of Burgundy and which would come to define him as one of the great bibliophiles of the age.32