The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Elizabeth’s favouring of Richard was hardly surprising. The previous summer, when Edward’s crushing of Warwick and the Lancastrians had finally brought to an end the period of agonizing uncertainty she had endured, a London poet had urged her both to ‘remember old troubles and things past’, and that Christ had ‘delivered you out of woe’. Elizabeth undoubtedly kept in mind her profound debt to her Maker: always demonstrably pious, as her royal role demanded, she seemed to grow more devout as the years passed.27 Equally, though, it would have been hard for Elizabeth not to recall ‘old troubles and things past’: the figure of Clarence, so instrumental in those troubles, was a constant reminder of them. Whatever she thought of Clarence, Elizabeth kept quiet. But her attitude manifested itself in one way – her backing of Richard in the brothers’ quarrel.

  Following his victory over Clarence at Sheen, Richard moved quickly to secure his prize. Away in Rome, on 22 April 1472, a papal clerk drew up the dispensation that allowed him to marry Anne Neville, his cousin; weeks later, a messenger arrived in England with the requisite paperwork. There had been a clerical error – the dispensation covered the third and fourth degrees of affinity, but not the first and second (Anne was both Richard’s first cousin and sister-in-law). Still, nobody seemed particularly concerned about the mistake. Richard, presumably, put in a fresh application; soon after, the pair were married.28

  Sometime that year, Richard ordered his secretary to begin a new work of reference: an exhaustive list of his titles and rights to land and offices, including grants made by Edward to his ‘dearest brother’, and those he had acquired through his wife’s inheritance. Everything was itemized, even grants that Edward had made him in his youth and then, thinking better of it, cancelled and distributed elsewhere: the honour of Richmond, for instance, given instead to Clarence; and the lands of the earls of Oxford, subsequently handed back to the most recent incumbent, John de Vere.

  Richard wanted a record of everything that he had ever been given, and to which he might therefore lay claim in the future. After all, the backsliding earl of Oxford, on the run since Barnet, had again forfeited his title and lands to the crown, following which Edward had regranted them to Richard. Like Clarence, Richard understood that there was no knowing when he might have to defend his rights – or when the opportunity might arise to reassert a once-dormant claim. When that time came, he would be ready. Over the coming years, this cartulary would grow, items written in by different hands in different inks at different times. It would become a map of Richard’s consolidation and expansion of his ducal empire, and the expression of a great lord ambitious for the power to which his blood and his loyalty entitled him.29

  Although the three brothers had thrashed out an agreement over the Warwick inheritance, the process at Sheen, rather than dispelling the mistrust between Clarence and Richard, only intensified it. With their slicing up of the dead earl’s lands still to be ringfenced and protected in law, neither brother was happy. Clarence felt that he had been ganged up on. Richard suspected his brother was being deliberately uncooperative. When, according to the terms of the Sheen settlement, Richard relinquished some lands to his brother, Clarence refused to reciprocate. Clarence also seemed newly aware of his own political vulnerability. Realizing quite how few friends he had at court, he tried to buy some, handing plum offices on his estates to Edward’s friend Lord Hastings – who, as a contemporary bluntly assessed, had more influence with the king and the lords than any man alive.30 Meanwhile, that spring, conspiracy resurfaced.

  On Saturday 25 April, at his spectacular Hertfordshire house of The More, Archbishop George Neville awaited a royal visit. Following the disasters that had overtaken his family in the past year, Neville, back in royal favour, had finally begun to relax. Earlier that spring, he and Edward had spent several days together at Windsor Castle, and had had ‘right good cheer’ hunting in the surrounding parkland; so much so that Edward had proposed to come and stay with him at The More, to ‘hunt and disport with him’ further. Delighted at this mark of grace, Neville’s preparations were lavish. Some seven years previously, to celebrate his creation as archbishop of York, he had laid on a feast that people were still talking about; now, he was determined to prove an equally sensational host to his king. Fetching the vast quantities of jewels, plate, glass, tapestries and soft furnishings that he had hidden securely in London ‘and diverse other places’ after the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and borrowing ‘more stuff off other men’, he had also laid in copious quantities of food and drink, ensuring that his newly constructed cellar was prodigiously stocked. He had prepared everything ‘as richly and pleasantly as he could’. But that Saturday, Neville instead received a visit for which he was not prepared at all.

  Late in the evening, a detachment of the king’s household men clattered over the drawbridge, through the crenellated gatehouse and, brushing Neville’s shocked servants aside, headed for the archbishop’s apartments. Arresting him, they disappeared into the night. Where they had taken him, or whether he was still alive, nobody knew.

  Some days later, people started to get wind of what had happened. Neville had been taken the twenty-five miles or so to the Tower, where he was imprisoned. Two nights later, he was marched down to London’s docks and hustled on board a ship, which weighed anchor and headed down the Thames for the open sea and Calais, where he was locked up in the border fortress of Hammes.

  It was unclear what Neville had done wrong. ‘Men say that he hath offended, but some men say nay’, observed John Paston noncommittally. For all his new-found geniality towards the archbishop, Edward had continued to keep an eye on him. Word had reached the king that Neville was receiving shady visitors – one had even brought letters to him at Windsor, right under the king’s nose – and had idly discussed a plot to depose Edward. One of the servants hovering in Neville’s attendance as he did so was his own treasurer, Edmund Chaderton, who had gone straight to the king with an account of the conversation. Neville’s visitors were apparently agents of the exiled Lancastrian earl of Oxford, who that spring had launched several guerrilla attacks on the Calais enclave. After his arrest, Neville was charged with high treason for providing aid, probably financial, to this nebulous conspiracy. The indictment itself was thin: it didn’t even mention Oxford, citing a number of unknown Yorkshiremen, of whom only one was named. But Edward wasn’t about to take any chances with a man whose loyalties had over the years had proved exceptionally flaky. There was, too, another reason why he was inclined to accept Chaderton’s evidence at face value.

  As George Neville was shipped off to Calais, two of Edward’s senior financial officers, his chamber treasurer Thomas Vaughan and William Parr, now controller of the royal household, turned up at The More. They summarily dismissed the archbishop’s stunned entourage – ‘every man his way’, remarked John Paston – including the various hangers-on, ‘great clerks’ and ‘famous doctors’ from the University of Cambridge who comprised Neville’s intellectual salon. Securing the house, Vaughan, Parr and their men then itemized and inventoried their way through its opulent interior with a practised efficiency, stripping it bare of ‘all the goods that were therein’. The whole collection, they estimated, was worth a jaw-dropping ‘£20,000 or more’. Everything – the exquisite jewels, plate, furnishings, books and fine wine amassed by Neville over the years – was loaded onto carts and driven off.31

  The haul was then given to the household of the king’s son and heir – whose chamberlain, conveniently enough, Vaughan also was.32 Edward kept one item for himself: the archbishop’s jewel-encrusted mitre, which he ordered broken up and remade into a new crown. He also annexed Neville’s ecclesiastical lands, the profits from which were, as usual, siphoned off into his chamber.33 It was hard not to interpret Edward’s proposed visit to The More as a way of getting Neville to bring out all his concealed riches into plain sight, before the king’s men pounced.

  To some, George Neville’s treatment perhaps brought to mind the notori
ous case of Sir Thomas Cook, the London merchant whose victimization back in 1468 had done much to focus resentment against the Woodville family. It rather suggested that Edward either hadn’t learned much from the episode – or that, as undisputed sovereign in his own land, he didn’t care; now, people would think twice before sticking up for Neville. Besides which, in going out of his way to acquire the fine things after which he hankered, Edward was only doing what was expected, even demanded, of kings – even if the methods he used were a bit much.

  Around this time the Lancastrian propagandist and political theorist Sir John Fortescue, determined to emphasize his new-found Yorkist allegiance, presented Edward with a treatise: ‘On the Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy’. Mining historical, legal, religious and political works, The Governance of England, as it would later become known, was a blueprint for the reform of England’s monarchy.34 In it, Fortescue – who in recent years had experienced up close the crisis that gripped England’s monarchy – tackled the intractable problems that had come to obsess him and many of the country’s ruling elites, and that had driven people to rise up in their multitudes in discontent. Central to Fortescue’s vision of a renewed monarchy was a long-established idea, one that Edward had wholeheartedly embraced since first ascending the throne. The ‘magnificence and grandeur’ of the king’s household was, Fortescue asserted, crucial in the projection of his, and the country’s, power, wealth and honour: ‘no realm may prosper, or be worshipful, under a poor king’. It was crucial that a king had enough money for great architectural projects, to enable him to buy ‘rich clothes and rich furs’; to swathe his houses in the finest of tapestries and soft furnishings; to collect exquisite plate, jewels and knick-knacks ‘convenient to his estate royal’. If a king was unable to live ‘as befits his royal majesty’, Fortescue warned, he would hardly be maintaining his unique, sovereign status. Magnificence, in short, was one way for a king to distinguish himself from even the greatest of his subjects – and it was crucial to do so, added Fortescue, for ‘there may no greater peril grow to a prince, than to have a subject of equal power to himself’.35

  But, as Fortescue was at pains to emphasize, a king could only be as magnificent as his finances allowed. Over the decades kings and their advisers had tried vainly to tackle the excessive spending, disorganization and peculation at the heart of the king’s household. What the king now needed, Fortescue wrote, was ‘a new foundation of his crown’: a new financial settlement enabling him to govern the realm in the manner which his royal dignity demanded. Such an endowment, Fortescue recommended, should be another ‘resumption’ – a royal clawing-back of the crown lands that, over time, the king had granted to his leading subjects – but this time with a system of checks and balances that ensured the king would never again ‘alienate’ them, or give them away. But if this was ambitious, and almost impossible in practice, there were other ways in which kings could implement economic reform.

  Soon after Fortescue had presented his treatise – almost as if in response to its advice – came the latest, comprehensive attempt at such reform. The Liber Niger Domus Regis Anglie Edwardi Quarti, or Black Book of the Household of Edward IV of England was nothing less than a refounding of the royal household: a sweeping vision of an establishment that stood testament to Edward’s idea of himself and his dynasty.36

  There had never before been anything quite like the Black Book. An extravagant document, its preface, bursting into verse and citing biblical tags, explained in detail how and why it had been produced. The product of Edward IV’s great council, it was the expression of a unified group of ‘wise, prudent and well learned men’, who brought to bear on the subject knowledge of the king’s household, both from personal experience and through ‘long study and deliberation’. Foremost among them were Edward’s cousin, the cardinal archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier, and his brothers Clarence and Richard. Citing some of the most celebrated royal households in history – from that of Solomon, famous for his ‘great renowned richesse, welfare and high largesse’, to Edward’s illustrious forebear Edward III, whose household had been, quite simply, ‘the house of very policy and flower of England’ – it aimed to surpass them all. It would be the new, unified kingdom in microcosm, the ‘new house of houses principal of England’.37

  The Black Book presented the household in its customary bipartite structure: the ‘house of magnificence’, the glittering ‘above stairs’ through which the king moved, held audience, ate and slept; and the unseen ‘below stairs’, whose mechanisms ran with purring efficiency. That this would be a household of strictly ordered magnificence – ‘the king will have his goods dispended, but not wasted’, the ordinance warned – was clear from the prominence given to the workings of the counting-house. So detailed and intimate a picture did the Black Book provide that, despite its many idiosyncrasies, it was handed down through generations. In the early seventeenth century, it was still kept among the records of the counting-house, riffled through by the increasingly exasperated officials of James I as they sought solutions to his extravagance.38

  The Black Book also detailed the institution at the household’s core: the closely guarded sequence of apartments that formed the privileged world of the king’s chamber. The chamber functioned separately, its staff a discrete unit who took ‘no gift’ given to the rest of the household, but were rewarded separately. These were the men under Lord Hastings’ command: the specially selected servants who, on a constant rota, attended on Edward day and night. They formed his personal security, ‘watching the king’, and performed the most intimate service: they dressed the king from his personal wardrobe and made up his bed; kept his ‘stool’ or commode, his bows and personal armoury, his books, his dogs and his ‘beast’ – a pet monkey, perhaps – and his library. When not attending on the king, they often ‘went messages’, riding out on the king’s confidential business.39

  In stark contrast to its minute description of the household’s financial workings, the Black Book was vague about the chamber’s arrangements. The king’s personal treasury now handled vast amounts of cash: income from the king’s lands and his business deals, customs duties and the enforcement of his prerogative rights. The way it functioned – a breezy informality coupled with opaque close control – was characteristic of Edward himself. Describing the role of the chamber treasurer Thomas Vaughan, the Black Book stated simply that everything he actioned was to be done ‘by the knowledge of the king and his chamberlain’s record’. Vaughan, in other words, answered solely to William Hastings and to Edward himself.

  Among its descriptions of the king’s personal servants, the Black Book detailed his phalanx of medical officers, from the master surgeon and his groom, who looked after the household’s medicine chest, to the apothecary who stocked it and who, when he made up the king’s prescriptions, was paid out of the chamber’s finances for his ‘medicines and ingredients’. Ever present at Edward’s side – when not in his own office ‘devising the king’s medicines’ – was the king’s physician.40

  Like all monarchs, Edward numbered physicians among his closest servants. Unsurprisingly, given their crucial role in keeping the king in full working order – and their intimate, round-the-clock contact with the royal person – royal doctors could accumulate significant power and wealth. William Hatteclyffe, also Edward’s secretary, was one of his confidential advisers and diplomats. During Hatteclyffe’s frequent absences from court, other equally long-serving consultant physicians were on hand: William Hobbes, an unswerving Yorkist who had served Edward’s father; and James Frise, a medic from Frisia. Back in 1461, Edward had welcomed Frise into his service with a golden handshake, a grant of several lucrative rents in the city of London that the determined physician terrified their former Lancastrian owner into handing over ‘by inordinate, undue and damnable means’, including death threats.41

  On the face of it, the vigorous Edward was a rather more straightforward medical proposition than his unstab
le Lancastrian predecessor. His medics, though, earned their keep. While Henry VI’s desperate consultants threw everything they could at the catatonic king – including ‘laxatives, medicines … clysters, suppositories, medicines for clearing the head, gargles, baths, poultices, fomentations, embrocations, shaving of the head, ointments, plasters, waxes, cupping (with or without cutting the skin) and inducements to bleeding’ – the challenge of Edward was a more subtle one.42

  With so much of medicine being about prevention rather than cure, about keeping the king in full vital working order, Edward’s medical advisers had long made concerned noises about his prodigious feats of consumption and sexual activity – rather suggesting that their efforts to regulate both had fallen on deaf ears. Nevertheless, from the outset of his reign, Edward also displayed an obsession about his health that was entirely in keeping with his compulsive tendencies, consuming sweetened powders and potions with the same gigantic appetite that fuelled his bingeing and womanizing. It was understandable enough. In what were years of almost constant plague and ‘great pestilence’, Edward and his doctors were preoccupied with warding off infection: anybody who could afford to do so – and most couldn’t – did much the same. After all, people had little choice, even though they knew much medicine wasn’t just overpriced and largely useless, but actively dangerous.

  Sporadic government attempts at regulation of the medical profession had little impact. One wonder drug was theriac, popularly known as ‘treacle’, a remedy with a history stretching back to antiquity whose active ingredient was roasted viper flesh. It was prescribed to the well and the sick for everything from skin conditions to heart trouble, the inducement of menstruation and, inevitably, plague – when, advised one practitioner, it was to be taken twice a day, dissolved in a little ‘clear wine or rosewater or ale’. Treacle was tricky to manufacture and almost always imported. With the medical industry eager to exploit the ill, scared and desperate, there was plenty of false product on the market, something eloquently summed up in a Scottish poet’s collective noun for the manufacturers: a ‘poison of treaclers’. In April 1472 a group of medical experts, led by Edward’s physician Roger Marshall, examined a number of ‘barrels and pots of treacle’ seized in the port of London and declared it ‘unwholesome’, following which the consignment was publicly burned in Cheapside.43