The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  Shortly after Epiphany, reports from eastern France of another death stunned everybody.

  That winter, Charles the Bold’s attempt to regain the strategically vital city of Nancy had hardened into another long siege. The weather was bitter, further weakening his already inadequate forces: some four hundred Burgundian troops froze to death. On 5 January 1477 the defenders marched out of the besieged city and, joining forces with a newly arrived contingent of Swiss troops, tore into Charles’s army. In the chaos that followed, those who could, fled. The Burgundian duke’s body was discovered two days later, frozen, naked and battered almost beyond recognition (following which, it was said, hungry wolves had been at it). It was finally identified by Charles’s tell-tale scars and his customary long fingernails.50 The future of the house of Valois-Burgundy now hung on the slender shoulders of Charles’s only child and heir – his nineteen-year-old daughter Marie, now duchess of Burgundy – and the knowhow of her stepmother, Edward’s sister Margaret. Within days, their enemies were on the move.

  15

  The Most Extreme Purposed Malice

  ‘It seemeth to me’, Sir John Paston wrote home from London on 14 February 1477, ‘that all the world is quavering.’ With Charles the Bold’s death, northern Europe trembled on the brink of a radical and bloody reshaping as Burgundy’s great neighbours – the Habsburgs to the east and France to the west – clustered greedily around to claim the duchy for themselves. With the news came talk that England would get sucked into the devastating war that, as Paston put it, would soon ‘reboil’; as a result of which, he added darkly, ‘young men would be cherished’.1

  In France, Louis XI had greeted the demise of the man he called ‘the devil’ – and who, the previous summer, he had variously cited a heart murmur, a headache and piles to avoid meeting – with ecstasy. Even before Charles’s death was confirmed, he was mobilizing his armies. ‘Now is the time’, he told his commanders, ‘to bring to bear all of your five senses on placing the duchy of Burgundy in my hands.’ As they advanced into the disputed borderlands of Picardy and Artois, French forces met little resistance: one by one, fortresses and towns opened their gates and did homage to Louis. But in the great mercantile city of Arras people still hoped for a miracle, from England.

  As the French approached, a poem circulated through the city, conjuring up a courtly world, a fragrant garden in which the heady perfume of the marguerite attracted the rose. On behalf of his beloved sister Margaret – the marguerite – Edward IV would send an army across the sea to rescue Arras, and Burgundy, from the ravening French. After all, the ‘rose of England’ was ‘one of us’, part of the Burgundian family. He would be here soon and then French warmakers would tremble.

  The poem was partly right. The beleaguered new duchess of Burgundy – her fearful leading advisers already trickling away to Louis XI, enticed by bribes and the promise of favour – confirmed that her stepmother Margaret was in intense negotiations with Edward, ‘to persuade him to come to our aid’.2 Whether Edward would heed his sister’s call was another matter entirely.

  If Louis needed no invitation to march into the lands he claimed as his own, in England the mood was more deliberate. At Westminster, wrote Paston, Edward had convened a great council to debate England’s course of action in the face of this ‘great change’. Clarence and Richard were riding to London to join the discussions ‘in all haste’.3

  The house of Burgundy was, as the Arras poet had pointed out, family. Blood and honour, as well as long-standing treaties of mutual defence, demanded that Yorkist England come to its aid. For those who, following the fiasco of Picquigny eighteen months before, had pocketed their substantial French pensions with a sense of shame, here was a golden chance to put England’s chivalric reputation straight. As far as Paston had heard, though, there was no talk of war in the council chamber. The discussions, as far as he knew, revolved around more immediate concerns: the security of Calais and the preservation of peace, both with Flanders and especially with its aggressor, France.4

  There were good reasons to keep out of any forthcoming conflict. The difficulties involved in assembling another invading army were self-evident. Given the outcome last time, Parliament was hardly likely to indulge requests for a fresh tax. War against France, too, would imperil all the concessions that Edward had wrung from Louis, foremost among them his lucrative pension and his daughter’s planned marriage to Louis’ son and heir: a match dear not only to Edward’s heart, but to those of Queen Elizabeth and her family. Besides, the chaos of the new dispensation brought with it opportunity. Edward could hold over Louis the threat of English military intervention on Burgundy’s behalf, making sure he fulfilled the terms of the existing treaty and, perhaps, squeezing him for more money into the bargain. As Paston hinted, Edward and his inner circle of advisers – as keen as the king not to relinquish their French pensions – now saw England’s role not as aggressor but as power-broker, balancing its ‘amities’ with both France and Flanders to its best advantage. Sabre-rattling was part of this process. Going to war on behalf of the beleaguered duchy was not.

  What was more, the great council turned out to be little more than a cosmetic exercise in consensus politics, presumably to satisfy those lords uneasy over Edward’s distinctly unchivalrous abandonment of what they considered his obligations to Burgundy. Well before the council had even assembled, Edward and members of his inner circle had decided on their direction of travel, with John Morton and the trusted household knight Sir John Donne already on their way to the French court with a set of demands to extract from Louis XI. Hastings, so reluctant to leave a paper trail of evidence for his French pension, was part of the king’s privy decision-making process. Edward’s brothers, on the other hand, were absent. Riding furiously down from Yorkshire, Richard arrived late, to be presented with what was effectively a fait accompli. He accepted it blandly enough: after all, he was on good terms with the king’s close advisers, and in any case he had his own French pension to think of. But if Richard was sanguine, Clarence was not.5

  As she urged Edward to intervene against Louis XI, his sister Margaret offered an inducement. Her stepdaughter Marie of Burgundy was now the most eligible heiress in Europe. She would, Margaret proposed, be the perfect match for the recently widowed Clarence. Not only might such a marriage stop Louis from reordering Burgundy to his own designs, it offered the house of York the chance to do some political redrawing of its own. Such a marriage would see Clarence, the brother of whom Margaret was reputedly ‘more fond’ than ‘anyone else in the family’, become duke of Burgundy.6

  Clarence was still in mourning, his late wife’s body still lying in state in Tewkesbury Abbey, when talk of his possible marriage to Marie started to circulate. It wasn’t the first time the match had been suggested: Edward, indeed, had once proposed it over a decade previously, when feverishly pursuing his ever-closer union with Charles the Bold. Then, both the chief English negotiator Warwick – who had wanted Clarence to marry his own daughter – and the Burgundians, unwilling to entertain the prospect of Edward’s brother as a potential heir to the duchy, had greeted the idea with alarm and it had been quietly dropped. Now, Clarence was said to be wildly enthusiastic about the proposal. He was in a minority of one.

  Marie of Burgundy herself was said to be unimpressed by the idea. Just a few weeks previously she had been betrothed to Maximilian archduke of Austria, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick and heir to the great German house of Habsburg. As a counterweight to the existential threat presented by France, Maximilian was a more viable proposition than the brother of a king of England, something of which Louis XI was well aware. The French king had already made Marie a counter-offer: the hand of his seven-year-old son and heir, currently promised to Edward’s oldest daughter. Finally, even though she was said to have ‘devoted all her effort’ to bringing Clarence and Marie together, Margaret knew that the proposal was speculative at best. Even as she aired it, she and Marie were getting on with the ra
ther more realistic business of brokering a deal with the Habsburgs. Apart from anything else, Margaret knew that Edward was never going to agree to a marriage that would make Clarence one of the most powerful princes in Europe.7

  For more than a decade now, Clarence’s marital arrangements had provoked violent disagreement between the two brothers – for Clarence, indeed, they had been a catalyst for open rebellion against Edward – and his hankering after the Burgundian match only strengthened the king’s continued suspicions about his wayward brother. Apart from anything else, the Burgundian dukes themselves had a decent claim to the English crown through their Lancastrian heritage, a claim that Charles the Bold had reasserted in recent years. Perhaps, Edward believed, Clarence planned to use the duchy as a springboard for another attempt to depose him.8

  Edward’s response to Margaret’s proposal was deliberately obstructive. As one chronicler close to the heart of government put it, the king ‘threw all the obstacles he could in the way of any such marriage taking place’. Edward told Marie that she couldn’t have Clarence. Instead, he offered the young duchess another English nobleman with close Burgundian connections: the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville. Although he might have brought with him ‘a good number of soldiers’, Woodville was hardly a prestigious option to give the Burgundians pause for thought. The marital options laid before Marie were the heir to the house of Habsburg, the heir to the French throne, or, as Philippe de Commynes sneered, ‘a minor English earl’. Whether Edward genuinely thought Woodville a serious candidate for Marie of Burgundy’s hand in marriage, or whether – as was only too likely – he was having a laugh at Clarence’s expense, his brother was guaranteed to be deeply insulted. As usual, Clarence made no effort to conceal his fury. He was, as a contemporary put it, ‘vexed’.9

  Late that February, William Hastings sailed into Calais harbour. With him were sixteen men at arms, among them Sir John Paston, and 514 archers: a substantial company, but hardly the expeditionary force on which Burgundians had pinned their hopes. Sent to bolster the Calais garrison, its mission was clearly defined: to protect the English enclave and its borders, which ‘stand in great jeopardy and peril’ as a result of the ‘comings of our enemies’.10 Sending warm letters to senior French military officials, Hastings settled down to watch and wait.

  Louis, twitchy as ever, was convinced that there was more to Hastings’ arrival than a concern for Calais’ security. Over the following weeks, the rumours grew. Hastings had not brought five hundred men, but twelve hundred; moreover, he was scheming with Margaret to spirit away the Burgundian duchess to England, where she would marry Clarence. It didn’t help that the French advance had got bogged down, belatedly running into resistance in the Artois borderlands. Hesdin, the great castle of the Burgundian dukes, had been taken with difficulty – it had been ‘packed with huge numbers of soldiers’, grumbled Louis – while in Arras, uprisings flared against the occupying forces. Louis wanted to keep the English onside. Dispatching an envoy to Hastings, he stressed his commitment to the marriage between Edward’s daughter and the dauphin – a matter on which he had been stalling, palming off Edward’s ambassadors Morton and Donne with little more than the promise of future talks. He then asked Hastings to pass on to Edward a request for English military support against Burgundy. Hastings politely demurred. He didn’t want to risk communicating such sensitive matters to Edward by letter; equally, his commitments in Calais prevented him from returning to England to talk with the king in person. He suggested that Louis would be better off sending a formal embassy to England – and, he added, the French king might also want to send the latest instalment of Edward’s pension, which was now overdue.11 As these exchanges took place, reports reached Louis that Hastings’ men had been spotted twenty miles west of Calais in the port-fortress of Boulogne, offering military aid to its Burgundian defenders. Such manoeuvres flew in the face of Edward’s official policy of appeasement with France – but then, there was nothing like a little military activity to remind Louis to stick to his English commitments.12

  In the following weeks, correspondence between Hastings and the French king crackled with wary politesse. As Louis probed for inconsistencies in the official English line, Hastings stuck doggedly to it. Professing himself ‘shocked’ at French accusations of bad faith, he stressed that he was working hard for the ‘continuance of the truces’ between England and France. Then, in early May, Louis wrote to him with another query. He had been told ‘by some Scots’ that Edward IV had been laid low with some sort of infirmity or illness. Was this the case?

  Suspended in the French king’s artless enquiry was another question. If Edward was ill, perhaps his grip on affairs had slackened; perhaps others with instinctively Burgundian sympathies – such as Hastings – had taken it upon themselves to act on their own initiative. For instance, in quietly ramping up military action against France.

  Hastings presented the straightest of bats. There was nothing remotely wrong with Edward, he replied on 10 May: indeed, ‘God be thanked, he has been and remains in excellent health and prosperity and makes as merry as ever’. In fact, ‘that very day’, Edward was in Windsor Castle, presiding over the annual feast of the Order of the Garter, a picture of regal conviviality.13

  Louis, though, was adept at spotting a hint of flame through the smoke. As he feasted and drank at Windsor, Edward’s health was indeed a cause of concern, to both the king himself and those around him. The lateness of the Garter celebration that year, coming as it did weeks after the Order’s feast day of St George on 23 April, was no accident. Royal agents had recently uncovered a plot against the king – specifically, to weaken and enfeeble him. Two days after the rescheduled Garter feast, Edward announced a high-profile commission to indict and try the conspirators. The two events were clearly connected because the seventeen lords named on the panel included eleven of the twelve adult noblemen present at the Garter celebrations. The glaring exception, the nobleman omitted from the commission, was Clarence – which was hardly surprising because, as Edward’s men followed the trail of conspiracy, it led straight to him.

  It was, one court insider speculated, the debacle of the possible Burgundian marriage that had proved the tipping point. To add insult to injury, that spring Edward had waved away another marriage proposal for Clarence, this time from the Scottish king James III on behalf of his sister. Edward replied that Clarence was still in his year-long period of mourning, and therefore off limits. There was nothing to suggest the king had talked with his brother before declining the proposal – but by that point, the pair were barely talking at all.14

  Edward’s apparent resolution of the quarrel between Clarence and Richard, in the months before his invasion of France, in fact hadn’t settled anything – at least as far as Clarence was concerned. In the intervening months, he had continued to simmer at what he considered the unjust partition of the earl of Warwick’s lands in favour of Richard, as well as at the encroachment on both his lands and his networks of influence by those close to the king, aided and abetted by Edward himself. These resentments were compounded by the deaths of his wife and infant son, which, Clarence was starting to believe, were no accident. And now there was Edward’s refusal to let him marry again. If, in recent years, the chief object of Clarence’s fury had been Richard, his anger was tilting back to its original target: Edward.

  As far as Clarence was concerned, Edward had sought to frustrate his ambitions once before, in the late 1460s; now, he was convinced, the king was trying to destroy him completely. Edward, meanwhile, had come to think much the same of his mercurial younger brother: ‘each’, as one insider put it, ‘began to look upon the other with no very fraternal eyes’.

  Through the first months of 1477, Clarence was notable by his absence from court. Indeed, he made a point of ‘withdrawing more and more from the king’s presence’. When constrained to attend official business, he was a mute, glowering presence in the council chamber. On a rare appearance in the king’s hous
ehold, he abruptly turned down Edward’s hospitality: a public insult that, as one commentator put it, ‘severely disturbed’ the king’s glory. The implication was that Clarence feared being poisoned by his brother.

  This atmosphere of distrust, reported the same chronicler, was fuelled by a constant flow of rumour-mongers, ‘carrying the words of both brothers backwards and forwards, even if they had been spoken in the most secret chamber’.15 Even allowing for embellishment – and there was little that made writers salivate more than descriptions of court intrigue – the observation had the ring of truth. Clarence had never been one to curb his tongue, and his example had rubbed off on his servants; back in the late 1460s Warwick had been concerned enough about his household’s leakiness to take it in hand, without discernible results. As well as ostentatiously refusing the king’s food and drink, Clarence was said to have been spreading stories that the king ‘wrought by necromancy and used craft to poison his subjects’. For his part, Edward seemed increasingly fearful that Clarence was trying to do the same thing to him.16 That spring, those anxieties came to a head.