The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Seen one way, these were the actions of a concerned king, whose intervention through his son’s administration was simply intended to help Clarence out in an unstable region. From where Clarence was standing, things looked rather different. Hastings was already muscling in on his lands in the north and east midlands. Now the prince and his council, dominated by the ‘queen’s blood’, was encroaching on his authority in the west midlands, a region that Clarence ruled in his long-coveted capacity as inheritor to the earl of Warwick. Nor was that all. As he made this emphatic statement of royal control through his young son and heir, Edward was ramping up his involvement in Warwickshire, dispensing grants of land and office to local big men who already had links to Clarence. This was the kind of intervention that would inevitably result in the erosion of Clarence’s networks of influence, as men instead looked directly to the king and his heir for favour and justice – just as, on the Tutbury estates, they now looked to Edward’s representative, Hastings.40 Clarence, perhaps, didn’t have to be paranoid to feel that Edward was attempting to cut him down to size.

  That year, a new book was in circulation at court. Back in 1471, shortly after Edward regained the throne, William Caxton had resigned his long-held governorship of the Merchant Adventurers. He was feeling tired – ‘age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the body’, he wrote – and in need of a change of scene. He had journeyed the two hundred miles east from Bruges to Cologne, where, with the encouragement of Edward’s sister Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, he settled down to finish a translation of the history of Troy on which he had been working fitfully for years. Cologne was a hub of the new technology of print. Ever the entrepreneur, Caxton was intrigued, then fascinated. He caught the bug. When, towards the end of 1472, he returned to Bruges, he took with him some cases of type and an assistant named Wynkyn de Worde; and he considered the business opportunities for the new technology back in his native England. In London and Westminster there existed a ready-made audience hungry for Burgundian culture. With his sharp eye for literary trends, Caxton would provide that culture, translated into English and in the most fashionable, up-to-date medium. One of his first books was an edition of a volume popular in Flanders but little known in England: the Jeu d’Echecs.

  A book of advice, it was stuffed full of aphorisms and stories by ‘ancient doctors, philosophers, poets and of other wise men’. Knowing the constant demand for fashionable books on public morality, Caxton – as was becoming his hallmark – added a prologue and an epilogue to provide some context for his English readers, did a print run of his translation and shipped it across the Channel. In the prologue of what he called The Game and Playe of the Chesse, he dedicated the book to the patron under whose ‘noble protection’ he had made it: George, duke of Clarence.41

  For all that Caxton made of Clarence’s support, there was little to suggest that the duke had had anything to do with the book at all. What encouragement there was stemmed, very probably, from the ‘mighty and virtuous’ princess who had already ‘commanded’ translations from Caxton: Clarence’s sister Margaret of Burgundy. In suggesting Caxton dedicate the book to Clarence, Margaret – who shared her husband Charles the Bold’s fear and loathing of the French king Louis XI – had a specific end in view. She wanted her brothers to stop quarrelling, make up and focus on the job in hand – the invasion of France.

  In his epilogue, Caxton was a cheerleader for Edward’s French war. The way for Edward to ‘reign gloriously’ in unity with ‘the nobles of the kingdom’, he advised, was through conquest of his ‘rightful inheritance’: the French throne. Echoing the prevailing wisdom, Caxton argued that war was a route to national virtue, peace and prosperity, a way for putting ‘idle people’ to work and for trade to prosper. If all this seemed like an echo of Edward’s parliamentary propaganda, it was.42 The message of the Game and Playe of the Chesse was evident. In dedicating the book to Clarence, Caxton was gently proposing that he sublimate his fraternal rage and focus on Edward’s great project, helping to bring the king’s long-cherished plan to fruition. Whether or not Clarence read the book, whether it even reached him, was unclear. But over the following months, he seemed to absorb the message contained in Caxton’s epilogue.

  During the first months of 1474, Edward’s French war still seemed a long way off. Parliament had reassembled briefly, expecting an update on his plans, before again being prorogued. No business had been done, and the frustrated lords and commons left with a series of royal excuses ringing in their ears: Edward’s chief partner in the invasion coalition, Charles the Bold, was distracted with his own expansionist military campaign; and besides, Edward had had his hands full with domestic problems. Foremost among which, of course, was the friction between his brothers.43

  By the time Parliament was again recalled a few months later, a key cause of that unrest had been resolved. In mid-February the earl of Oxford, holding out on St Michael’s Mount, finally capitulated. The siege had been more long-drawn-out than it should have been, and Edward had had to sack the besieging commander, Henry Bodrugan, for fraternizing with Oxford instead of fighting him. Finally, when his men had all been bought off by bribes and royal pardons, Oxford surrendered, on condition that Edward spare his life. Following an uncomfortable audience with the king at Windsor Castle, the earl was taken across the Channel to Calais, where he was immured in the border fortress of Hammes along with his fellow prisoner George Neville. Though Oxford’s resistance had in the end proved little more than a costly nuisance to Edward, it had threatened much more.

  Having tied up one loose end, Edward moved to knot another. The lesson he had tried to drive home to Clarence late the previous year had, it seemed, finally sunk in. That summer, Clarence finally agreed to the terms proposed by Edward for the splitting of the Warwick estates between himself and Richard. Then again, he had little choice: it was either that, or losing everything. In July, a mollified Edward returned most of Clarence’s confiscated lands to his brother; all except the wealthy lands around Tutbury, which remained in Hastings’ possession – as a reminder, perhaps, of what happened when you crossed the king.44

  Having finally, as he thought, partitioned the Warwick estates to his brothers’ satisfaction, Edward forced through a parliamentary act enshrining it in law. It was a squalid piece of legislation. Warwick’s widow Anne was formally disinherited, her vast estates split between her two daughters – which in effect meant their husbands, Clarence and Gloucester. The Countess Anne herself was made ‘naturally dead’, the redistribution of her property ‘as good and effectual in law’ as if it had been passed on by inheritance. Edward had ridden roughshod over the accepted customs and laws of inheritance in order to promote his family’s interests, and had used Parliament, the highest court in the land, to legitimize his actions. It would not be the last time.

  As the self-exculpatory wording of the act put it, the settlement was done for ‘various great and important reasons and considerations’ – the quarrel between his brothers, which Edward had otherwise struggled to control, and which had become so disruptive that it had become a major obstacle in Edward’s plans for his invasion of France. Now, Edward hoped, that particular boil had been lanced.45 He could turn his attention to his long-delayed war.

  The official date of his departure for France, agreed with Parliament, was Michaelmas, the end of September. That summer, however, he had neither an army nor the means to pay for it. In the last years, Parliament had voted taxes to the tune of £118,000, the sum Edward needed to keep an army in the field for twelve months. Now, commissioners announced that barely a quarter of that total had been collected.

  Yet there was, finally, a sense of momentum. The resolution of his brothers’ quarrel could now be added to breakthroughs on the diplomatic front. Following his settlement with the Hanse merchants, that July Edward trumpeted a new, wide-ranging treaty with Scotland, at its heart a marriage between his little daughter Cecily and the infant Scottish heir: one of France’s hitherto most reliable al
lies was isolated. Then, to his surprise and delight, Charles the Bold – who had paused in his eastern campaign long enough to remember quite how much he hated Louis XI – agreed to sign a new treaty of perpetual friendship, the cornerstone of which was a military alliance against France. With the twin problems of Scotland and the Hanse neutralized, and the might of Burgundy onside, Edward could start planning in earnest – provided, of course, that the Commons were prepared to help him make up the massive financial shortfall he faced.46

  Parliament caught the mood. Extending the deadline for the departure of Edward’s army for France by two years, they reconfirmed the so-far-uncollected taxes. This still left Edward some £51,000 short, a sum that the Commons obligingly agreed to find. Given that they could hardly go back to taxpayers a third time, they cast around for fresh sources. Much of the shortfall was to be made up by targeting a demographic which, having ‘not any or but little land, or other freehold’, was usually exempt from taxation: the poor.47

  Yet Edward’s mistrust of Charles the Bold hadn’t dissipated entirely – and with reason. As well as his new military alliance with Edward, Charles had, more or less simultaneously, renewed his truce with their mutual enemy, Louis XI. Edward also kept his options open. That August, an English herald arrived at the French court with a proposal from Edward. It was an offer of marriage, between his oldest daughter Elizabeth, now aged eight, and the dauphin, the French king’s heir. At the French court, genuine anxiety about the possibility of an English invasion mingled with the belief that, when it came to the crunch, Edward wouldn’t really go to war. As one Milanese ambassador reported, while people believed that Edward’s offer was ‘a sham’, intended to lull Louis into a false sense of security, they also felt that it was the product of genuine ill-feeling on Edward’s part towards his Burgundian brother-in-law. When pushed, the ambassador concluded, most believed that Edward wasn’t serious about invading. Everybody knew his fondness for the easy life, inclined as he was ‘towards quiet and peace rather than to war’.

  Louis, though, was taking no chances. By September, with increasingly reliable reports confirming English military mobilization, he was reviewing his coastal defences and renewing his attempts to puncture Edward’s diplomatic alliances with Scotland and Burgundy. Louis also sent an embassy to England, headed by the marshal of his household, a prying man called Christophe Lailler, with a present for Edward of two coursers from his stables.48 When Lailler arrived a few weeks later, Edward was out of town, on progress. Lailler waited.

  Along with the beautiful horses, Lailler brought another gift from Louis – or rather, three gifts: an ass, a wolf and a boar. The boar was the emblem of the duke of Brittany; the wolf, less heraldically evident, represented the slavering Charles the Bold. That left the ass, which, by extrapolation, could only be Edward. The ass didn’t have any heraldic connotations with the house of York; it simply showed what Louis thought of the English king.

  Over the years, Louis and Edward had got used to trading insulting diplomatic gifts. This one, though, had a particular resonance. A typically antic gesture on Louis’ part, it brought to mind the tennis balls sent by the French dauphin to Henry V some sixty years before. Arguably, it was even more offensive. Edward’s response, like Henry V’s before him, was emphatic.

  In October, in a letter widely circulated in England, he replied thanking Louis for his gifts, ‘for they be very necessary for war’. Turning Louis’ bestial analogy on its head, Edward confirmed that treaties had been made with both Charles the Bold and Duke Francis of Brittany, who had made a covenant with ‘the beasts of my country, to teach them the way into France’. Invoking a variety of heraldic animals, all references to his leading noblemen, Edward conjured up a picture of himself as a huntsman at the head of a pack of slavering beasts, inciting them on a vicious hunt through France.

  For those with long memories, the metaphor recalled Edward’s relationship with Warwick back in 1460, the young bearward deploying his ravening bear against his Lancastrian enemies. Here again, in his letter to Louis, was the image of an English king in full control, forging his nobles’ aggressively independent instincts into a powerful weapon of state. Foremost among these mighty lords were ‘the black bull with the gilt horns’ and another boar: his brothers, Clarence and Richard. ‘Your mock’, Edward concluded on a note of threatening triumph, ‘shall turn you to shame,/ For I am master of the game.’49

  14

  War Outward

  In November 1474, in a tent outside the Rhine city of Neuss, the Burgundian chamberlain Olivier de la Marche was putting the finishing touches to a document written at the special request of Edward IV. Winter was coming on and de la Marche, intimately involved with English affairs over the years, was probably grateful for something to do. That summer Charles the Bold, spotting an opportunity to further his glorious vision of a greater Burgundy, had marched his army east into the Rhineland. He headed towards Cologne, whose ruler had appealed to him for military aid against rebels who had taken control of the city. The nearby city of Neuss was also in rebel hands, and Charles decided to target it first; a less daunting proposition, it would provide an easy and morale-boosting win, a statement of intent – or so Charles thought. Having laid siege to Neuss at the end of July, he was still there four months later, having failed to make a dent in the city’s defences. Louis XI, who was doing everything he could to distract Charles from joining forces with the English, was delighted. Edward, deep into the preparations for his French campaign, was not. Charles needed a nudge. That autumn, the victualler of Calais, William Ross – the man responsible for stockpiling and maintaining weaponry as well as supplies – had written to de la Marche on the orders of his superior Lord Hastings, with a special request from the English king.1

  De la Marche was a master of organization. Having overseen the elaborate ceremonial of Charles’s marriage to Edward’s sister Margaret back in 1468, he had since supervised a complete overhaul of the Burgundian ducal household. Now, its shimmering glamour was underlaid by iron discipline: it was a well-oiled fighting machine. As Edward prepared his French campaign, he wanted a blueprint to follow. Edward had, of course, fought many battles in England, but these had been brief, often hasty mobilizations. Invading France was of a different order of magnitude: barely anybody now remembered the last time it had been done, by Henry V more than half a century ago. Edward’s request had another purpose: a reminder to Charles that he, at least, was getting on with the invasion plans, it carried the implicit suggestion that the Burgundian duke might like to start doing the same.

  That November, de la Marche sent Ross his Estat de la maison du duc Charles de Bourgogne, an ordinance detailing the Burgundian household in all its spectacular military precision, and the expense involved. It was, perhaps, a reassuring indication that Edward remained in Charles’s mind. That winter, though, as the Burgundian army slowly froze at Neuss, Edward might have been forgiven for wondering how long Charles was going to stay there.2

  Meanwhile, Edward was busy. Through the summer and autumn of 1474, he recruited the bulk of the thirteen thousand archers Parliament had promised to fund, their captains signing detailed indentures covering everything from muster details to the division of spoils. Across England, teams of craftsmen were contracted to produce all that was needed: from crossbows and longbows to gun carriages and ammunition: explosive, cannonballs, crossbow bolts and tens of thousands of sheaves of arrows.3 At the same time, the king’s envoys and ambassadors continued to lobby and negotiate in the courts and chancelleries of Europe, wrapping up treaties critical to France’s diplomatic isolation.

  Among them was an agreement with the powerful Italian condottiere Federico da Montefeltro, whose forces, English military planners dreamed, could be instrumental in launching a simultaneous attack on France from the south. Trying to win his backing, Edward handed Montefeltro membership of the Order of the Garter, an honour after which the old mercenary had long hankered. Foremost among the knights who lined up
to sponsor his election – doubtless in admiration of his deeds as well as his legendary court at Urbino – were Richard and his friend Henry duke of Buckingham. A gratified Federico commissioned two paintings of himself to mark the occasion. One, a full-length portrait, showed him in his usual profile pose, concealing his blind right eye and horrific scar – the result of a tournament injury years previously – and showing the absent bridge of his nose, removed on his orders to give his good left eye a better field of vision. Sitting in his study in full plate armour, reading a weighty tome, Federico was portrayed as the epitome of the cultured, chivalric prince. Most prominent of all, buckled around the armoured left leg that he turned out towards the viewer, was his new garter.4

  Back at home, Edward’s tax collectors raked in the exorbitant sum Parliament had voted him for his war. Late in November, ten receivers rode across the country to gather the monies that had been collected and deposited in designated secure locations, and which they would take back to Westminster under heavy guard for accounting at the Exchequer. That was the theory. Weeks later, the frustrated receivers reported a picture of widespread tax-dodging and peculation: collectors had failed to pay in the gathered taxes, instead keeping the money for ‘their own use’; or they had done so, only for the cash to be appropriated by the officials appointed to keep it under lock and key; or, the cash was simply not kept securely, people breaking and entering with ‘strong hand’ and making off with it. So ‘diffuse and laborious’ had the receivers found their job that some failed to pay in any money at all to the Exchequer. The king and his councillors, though, had anticipated such a shortfall.5