by Thomas Penn
Still steaming about his treatment in Calais, Aliprando’s dispatches were long on speculation and snippiness. Edward might, he conceded, be a ‘handsome and worthy prince’, but his people were ‘bad and perverse’ and his council full of fat, ageing and anti-papal bishops. Relations between England and the Hanse merchants were once again at a low ebb, and Hanse pirates more or less controlled the Channel, plundering English vessels with impunity. Turning to the English plans for war against France, Aliprando thought there was little chance of Edward invading soon, given the mistrust between him and Charles the Bold – brothers-in-law they may have been, Aliprando added, but they were ‘not good friends’ – and the English propensity to be long on talk and short on action. Moreover, things in England were ‘doubtful and changeable’. If Edward were really to lead an army into France, he would have to be very confident indeed in the people who would rule England in his absence.
For, Aliprando concluded, the people didn’t love Edward. They saw him as weak and wobbly: ‘a tavern bush’, an inn sign swinging helplessly in the political breeze. They longed for a strong leader, someone who could get a grip on the country, and impose law and order with an iron rule: ‘another Warwick’.
Reading between the lines, it was clear where Aliprando had got his information: George Neville, whose cultural sophistication and instinctive papal sympathies played well with Aliprando, as with papal envoys before him. Somehow, he had managed to make contact with the archbishop in his Hammes prison. Certain details, such as the fact that Edward still owed Neville 20,000 ducats, could only have come from the archbishop himself; so too, very probably, the contemptuous dismissal of Edward’s wavering kingship.
On the face of it, the ‘tavern bush’ was an image that sat oddly with the implacable victor of Barnet and Tewkesbury. George Neville, though, knew Edward as well as anybody. During the late 1460s he had witnessed at first hand Edward’s tentative, lackadaisical leadership, his tendency to let things drift and his inability to command the hearts of the people – weaknesses that, along with Warwick and Clarence, Neville had exploited and punished. While Aliprando and Neville both had their agendas, even those well-disposed to Edward remarked on similar flaws. At their annual conclave, the members of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece underwent a process of self-examination, each knight’s character and actions reviewed by his peers. This included absent members, of which Edward was one – and, with Edward having recently been among his brother knights during his Flanders exile, they had plenty of first-hand evidence to go on. Their analysis of Edward was full of praise: he was a courageous and skilled fighter, virtuous and a good friend. Then, however, came the criticism. Edward, his fellow knights agreed, was not blessed with foresight: with greater awareness, he might have spotted the dangers which had resulted in the reigniting of England’s civil wars and his own exile. Moreover, the English king had ‘so little self-confidence’ that unless those trusted advisers close to him praised his plans and schemes, he would ‘not dare to carry them out’; nor would he do anything unless backed by his men. Whether this trait was the fault of nature or nurture, the knights couldn’t say.
Implicit in the knights’ critique was not only the suggestion that Edward was fundamentally lazy, but that he was in the habit of leaning on a circle of friends whose approbation he craved, and without which he felt – as the knights’ appraisal put it – ‘diffident’: doubtful, uncertain, fearful. If, in other words, you scratched the surface of Edward’s awesome royal charisma, you found a thin-skinned insecurity, an inability to accept criticism and a constant desire for affirmation. All of which chimed with Aliprando’s ‘tavern bush’ insult.
Aliprando found George Neville’s character assassination of Edward seductive. If, he opined, Neville could escape from custody, ‘he will yet accomplish something’, not least because a new figurehead, ‘another Warwick’, was manoeuvring to overthrow the king: ‘his brother the duke of Clarence’.9
Despite his professed aim to give Sforza ‘truthful and agreeable advices’, Aliprando was drawn to rumour like a moth to a flame: unfounded gossip about Clarence’s intrigues was catnip to him. But while Clarence, still incensed at being deprived of a chunk of the Warwick inheritance that he believed to be rightfully his, continued to square up to his brother Richard, such talk of rebellion against Edward seemed wide of the mark. There was no specific information that Clarence was up to anything. As Edward knew from bitter experience, though, local trouble could, if effectively harnessed, quickly blow up into regime-challenging violence. It would pay the king to keep a particularly close eye on the way Clarence ran his estates, the activities of his followers, and the duke’s own movements – and in all this Edward was reminded constantly by the people who clustered around him. Foremost among these were the queen’s family, ever-mindful of the savagery with which Clarence had moved against them after Edgecote; the king’s own household men, their memories of Clarence’s serial disloyalties still raw; and Richard himself.
Throughout the early months of 1473, Edward tried tirelessly to resurrect his plans for war against France. Royal diplomats shuttled between London and Edinburgh, trying to prise Scotland away from its traditional alliance with France. In the Low Countries, Edward’s secretary William Hatteclyffe sat down for talks with the Hanse merchants: still stewing over Edward’s failure to fulfil his promises to them, Hanse privateers had launched a fresh onslaught against English shipping. Meanwhile, an embassy led by Lord Hastings arrived at Charles the Bold’s court bearing terms and conditions for the joint Anglo-Burgundian invasion, on which Edward’s ‘affection was now greatly set’. Edward’s demands included ten thousand Burgundian troops, under English command – and he wanted them by April that year, when he planned to cross to France.10 The English ambassadors found Charles with his gaze turned eastward. Desperate to fulfil his long-harboured dreams of expansion into the Rhineland, and the transformation of Burgundy from a duchy into a sovereign state, Charles’s military ambitions clearly lay, as far as Edward was concerned, in precisely the wrong direction. Charles, who didn’t want Louis’ armies bothering him while his back was turned, had already come to terms with the delighted French king. That March, his invasion plans clearly going nowhere for the time being, Edward followed suit, buying time by concluding a year-long truce with France. He didn’t bother telling Parliament, which had just voted him another tax.11
It did so grudgingly. If Edward’s slick public-relations campaign of the previous autumn had quelled the Commons’ unease over his habitual misspending of taxes, those concerns quickly resurfaced. Even as the invasion was postponed, Edward – with the backing of the lords – was twisting Parliament’s arm to hand over the money to him as soon as it had been collected. Throughout the country, as the impact of the taxes bit, Sir John Paston – one of the MPs who had voted for Edward’s demands – received a letter from the family home in Norfolk: ‘rather the devil, we say’, grumbled his younger brother, ‘than you should grant any more taxes’, an observation which Sir John met with a discreet silence.12
Edward, as usual, was exploring other sources of credit. February found Louis XI chuntering about a familiar financial bugbear of his: the bank of Medici, which, not content with having underwritten Margaret of York’s wedding and Edward’s conquering return from his Burgundian exile, was continuing to extend finance to the English government. When a representative of the bank’s newly reopened branch in Lyons arrived at the French court, one of Louis’ advisers pulled him aside to tell him in no uncertain terms that Lorenzo de’ Medici’s money made the French king ‘more wars than the enemy’.13
The Medici, though, had long since lost control over their own lending policies – at least as far as their London branch was concerned. Despite constant and increasingly emphatic reprimands from head office, Gherardo Canigiani had gone on lending to Edward. His total loans to the regime now stood at a vertiginous £26,000, making the Medici by some distance the largest single creditor of Edward�
�s reign. For Canigiani, it made sense. His loans were always secured, mostly with the coveted export licences, and with Edward genuinely appreciative of Canigiani’s support ‘in our great necessity’, the Medici were in prime position to take advantage of business opportunities as they arose.14 The problem was, there weren’t enough of them. From Florence, all Canigiani’s panicked superiors saw was a massive balance of payments deficit, the value of English wool and cloth exports nowhere near offsetting the Medici’s loans and imports – chiefly alum and fine textiles – into England. Writing to Tommaso Portinari in Bruges, Lorenzo de’ Medici urgently told him to take control of the London office. Canigiani, he implied, had gone native – ‘he has served the king with our money’ – while his loans threatened to provoke a crisis with France that the Medici could ill afford.
All of which was compounded by disaster. Late that April, off the Flanders coast east of Calais, two Medici galleys loaded with alum and luxury goods for the English market were intercepted by Hanse privateers. One of the galleys managed to outrace its pursuers and reach the safety of Southampton. The pirates ran down and boarded the other, the San Matteo, towing it off to Danzig. Its cargo of alum, valued at 40,000 florins, was a huge loss to the Medici. Other injured parties included Agnolo Tani, the troubleshooter who had declared his experience of dealing with the London branch akin to that of trying to revive a corpse. On the San Matteo was an artwork he had commissioned from a Bruges-based artist called Hans Memling, a spectacular Last Judgment flanked by portraits of Tani and his wife, which was being shipped back to Florence; now, it was taken to Danzig, where it was given pride of place in St Mary’s Church.15 Then there was a group of London mercers, who had shipped goods in the San Matteo on the understanding that it had been fully insured. It hadn’t been, and they now found themselves ‘utterly deceived’. The man who now vigorously took up their case with Edward and the Medici was Canigiani. Both the loss of the San Matteo – itself hardly Canigiani’s fault – and the arrival in London of a henchman of Portinari’s, Cristofano Spini, who promptly swindled Canigiani in a business deal, tipped Lorenzo de’ Medici over the edge. Later that year, Canigiani was sacked. He didn’t seem to mind much. Promptly marrying the widow of a rich London merchant, he took English citizenship, whereupon a grateful Edward gave him a key post in Calais, as keeper of the exchange there. He was well aware of how well Canigiani had served him.16
In mid-April Edward left London on progress, in an effort to restore royal control in regions of chronic disorder. His itinerary would take him on an arc through the midlands to the Welsh borders. Apart from mollifying the disgruntled commons, the king had particular aims in view. For a start, it was all too clear that – in a reversal of the line that outward war would bring inward peace – a long military campaign against France could hardly be undertaken without first solving domestic political problems. For the problem of Wales and the Marches, Edward had alighted on an idea that dovetailed neatly with his ambitions for his own son and heir. He would hand the little boy – and the newly reconfigured council who represented his interests – sweeping powers to crack down on disturbances and to enforce royal authority. Before he left London, Edward sent the little prince on ahead, together with Queen Elizabeth and members of his council; he would link up with them at Ludlow later in the summer.
As Edward rode into the east midlands, it was turning into a fine spring. With him were some of his heavy hitters: his chamberlain William Hastings and Thomas, Lord Stanley, his steward and linchpin in England’s northwest; Anthony Woodville; the duke of Buckingham; and, above all, his brother Richard – who, doubtless, took the opportunity presented by the long journey to discuss with Edward his aims and desires. Clarence wasn’t with them. There was a sense of purpose in Edward’s progress and, also, of vigilance. There would be trouble, people said, before May was out.17
On 16 April, Good Friday, Sir John Paston was riding eastwards. He was heading for the Kent coast to take ship for Calais, where he was serving under Hastings’ command. Staying the night at Canterbury, he wrote to his brother. Edward’s truce with France was now general knowledge, while the detachment of archers he had promised Charles the Bold the previous autumn – which, in fact, had never made it across the Channel – had been demobilized and were ‘coming home by the highwayful’. Sir John feared for his belongings, brought on by carriage behind him, but in the end they turned up: ‘all was safe’. In London, meanwhile, there were widespread rumours about a ‘work’ – a plot – of some sort. A soothsayer Paston knew, a man called Hogan from a well-to-do Norfolk family, had been arrested by royal agents and brought to the Tower: his ‘old tales’, apparently, prophesied unrest that spring. Hogan was interrogated and threatened with execution for provoking unrest. But, as it turned out, he was right.18 A few days previously, Paston told his brother, the fugitive Lancastrian earl of Oxford had been spotted at the French Channel port of Dieppe, preparing to sail with a flotilla of twelve ships.
Since his raids on Calais the previous year, Oxford had sought backing from Louis XI. Casting around for ways to distract Edward from his invasion plans, the French king had thrown a modest amount of money the earl’s way, fitting out a small fleet to carry him and his men to England ‘to do what he can against king Edward’. A Milanese ambassador at Louis’ court reported that Oxford was going to try to revive Warwick’s networks and ‘to become leader of the earl’s party’ – though in the same breath he acknowledged ruefully that he had little idea of what was going on in England, and had heard ‘a great variety of things’. There was another interpretation: that Oxford was going to link up with the nobleman who had inherited Warwick’s earldom and his networks in the midlands – Clarence.19
As the rumours escalated, so too did the arrests. A contact of Paston’s told him that Oxford was due to attempt a landing on the East Anglian coast, where around ‘a hundred gentlemen in Norfolk and Suffolk’ had agreed to turn out for him. Shortly after their conversation, the same man was detained, accused of raising funds for Oxford’s cause, and interrogated. For his part, Paston was anxious to put distance between himself and the earl. Back in 1471, the Pastons’ decision to follow Oxford, and with him Lancaster, had seen Sir John narrowly escape execution and had left the family’s fortunes on the brink of disaster. Now, writing to his brother in Norfolk, he dismissed the rumours of conspiracy as ‘flying tales’. For all that, he seemed to know an awful lot, right down to the date of Oxford’s proposed landing, which, ‘if wind and weather serve him’, would be on 27 May, eight days after the feast day of St Dunstan. All of which seemed to send a veiled warning to his brother: if approached by the plotters, don’t get involved. ‘God have you in keeping’, he concluded, meaningfully.20
Paston’s timings were only a day out. On 28 May, returning from a fruitless trip to Scotland in search of support – James III, now twenty and eager for a rapprochement with Yorkist England, batted the rebel earl away – Oxford made landfall at St Osyth on the Essex coast, a stone’s throw from one of his manors at Wivenhoe.21 Edward’s intelligence, though, had been good. The area bristled with royal forces: the retinues of Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, and lords Dinham and Duras. Oxford’s supporters in the region wisely stayed at home. Equally wisely, Oxford made himself scarce. His small fleet retreated to the Isle of Thanet off the easternmost tip of Kent, where it remained, ‘hovering’, preying on passing ships.
News of the earl’s attempted landing had, Paston wrote wryly, ‘saved Hogan his head’: now, the king was taking the soothsayer’s prognostications seriously. Although Oxford’s landing had been repulsed, the very fact of its attempt seemed to heighten the febrile mood. In London, people started to arm themselves; they didn’t know quite why, but it felt good to be prepared. Armed men of the king’s household appeared on the city streets; so too did Clarence’s retainers, identifiable by the black bull badge conspicuously pinned to their jackets.22
Mention of Clarence led Paston on to news of the earl of Warwick’
s widowed countess, Anne, who remained under armed guard in the Hampshire abbey of Beaulieu. Anne was a much-sought-after lady, her dower estates – part of the Warwick inheritance – a particular bone of contention between Clarence and Richard. After the battle of Tewkesbury, Edward had initially granted the bulk of the countess’s estates to Clarence; then, following the brothers’ tetchy meeting at Sheen the previous year, he had reallocated them to Richard. Clarence refused to hand them over. Anne herself, appalled at the prospect of losing her hereditary lands to either brother, had energetically lobbied Edward and those close to him, pleading to be allowed to keep what was legally hers; questions had even been raised in Parliament. Finally, Paston heard, the countess was ‘out of sanctuary’ – but not on her own terms.
In a move sanctioned by the king himself, the countess of Warwick had been given into the custody of a group of Richard’s servants. Now, she was being brought north to Richard’s base of Middleham Castle, which had once been her home. Aiming to slice through the thicket of legal complexity preventing the transfer of the countess’s estates to Richard, Edward and his brother had – perhaps in discussion on the king’s leisurely progress into the midlands that spring – cooked up a plan. It allowed Richard, ‘with the king’s assent’, to make a barefaced land grab, one that spoke volumes for the regime’s priorities. And, Paston added with understatement, ‘some men say that the duke of Clarence is not agreed’.23
Richard was proving remorseless in pursuit of his rights. Among the lands which he believed were rightfully his – given to him as a child by Edward, only to be taken back and regranted elsewhere – were the estates of the Lancastrian earl of Oxford. When, after Tewkesbury, Oxford had forfeited his title and estates, Richard (who had instructed his secretary to include the original, superseded grant in his cartulary of lands and offices) badgered Edward for the lands. Edward duly let his brother help himself. It wasn’t only the exiled earl who suffered, but his family. His wife, Margaret, given not a penny of income by Edward or Richard, was said to be existing solely on charitable handouts. Then, at Christmas 1472, Richard had gone after Oxford’s mother.