The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  That winter, plague re-erupted. Sweeping across the country, this epidemic proved devastating. The usual precautions and remedies were taken. Those who could afford it clutched pomanders packed with aromatic herbs to ward off the poisonous air and took medical advice – not that they generally expected the prescriptions to work. In London, as usual, the wealthy fled. Chief among them was the king.11

  Throughout the early months of 1479 the royal household kept a safe distance from the pestilential city, moving regularly and often between the king’s Thames-side houses, their rooms cleaned and scrubbed with a fretful thoroughness, from the Berkshire manor of Easthampstead, skirting London to the south through Croydon, to Eltham and back again, settling by late February at Sheen. The expansiveness of the previous year seemed to have evaporated, replaced by a fear-filled caution.

  As usual, both Edward and his doctors watched anxiously for any signs of diminished vitality in the king’s body. In his privy chamber, the pungent aroma of burning aloeswood and ambergris mixed with camphor and rosewater hung in the air: one of the special fumigations, prepared by the royal apothecary John Clark to ward off the pestilence, which Edward inhaled before going to sleep. As well as ingesting various potions, syrups and waters – including the inevitable treacle and aqua imperiale, a concoction designed to ward off all manner of poison and pestilence – prescribed by his solicitous medical team, Edward obtained a papal dispensation to eat meat and eggs during Lent. If in all this there was something of the hypochondriac, it was hardly surprising. Despite all the precautions, plague penetrated the royal establishment. That March, Edward and Elizabeth’s one-year-old son George fell sick and died, the little boy buried in the king’s unfinished chapel at Windsor.12

  The charged atmosphere seemed to suffuse Edward’s ongoing negotiations with Louis XI over the issue closest to his heart: the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to the French king’s son and heir Charles. That February, the princess reached the legally marriageable age of thirteen, which – according to the treaty Edward and Louis had signed three years previously – triggered the marriage and Louis’ provision of an annual jointure of 50,000 crowns. In the face of English insistence, the French king dispatched a team of negotiators to England. Their message was blunt. Though Edward’s daughter might be ready, the eight-year-old dauphin Charles was not: there was no way that the betrothal could take place nor the jointure be paid.

  In Edward’s council chamber, there was uproar. An uncompromising John Morton told the French representatives that this was a deal-breaker. If Louis failed to move the marriage forward, the Anglo-French alliance was off. Instead, Edward would reach an agreement with France’s sworn enemy, the Burgundian duke Maximilian, who was offering rather more favourable terms: an annual pension of 60,000 crowns, trumping Louis’ pension to Edward by 10,000. Worn down by the combination of Morton and the xenophobia he encountered in England – on one occasion, in Windsor, Edward’s household men watched unconcernedly as a mob attacked his servants – the beleaguered French ambassador was browbeaten into signing all the documents the English put in front of him. In the meantime, Morton didn’t add, Edward had gone ahead and signed a new, secret, treaty with Maximilian anyway.13

  As the year progressed, an ambitious vision seemed to settle in Edward’s mind, one fuelled by the belief – shared by the more bellicose of his advisers – that he held all the cards: that foreign powers were in equal measure eager for England’s support and tremblingly fearful of its military might. Hitherto, Edward had pursued relationships with Burgundy or France: both, by nature of the mutual hostility between the two states, tended to be exclusive. Yet both Louis and Maximilian were desperate for English backing. Or, rather, Louis was desperate that Edward should stay out of any war between the two; Maximilian, on the other hand, was doing everything humanly possible to drag him into a new conflict against France.

  In July 1479, Edward’s envoys concluded a preliminary agreement to marry Edward’s little daughter Anne to Maximilian’s infant heir, Philip. Following the marriage treaties for his daughters Cecily and Elizabeth to the Scottish and French heirs respectively, this was another, potentially sensational, dynastic trophy: as well as the dukedom of Burgundy, Philip stood – if the stars aligned themselves fortuitously – to inherit the great Habsburg Empire itself. If, Edward seemed to reason, Burgundy and France needed England more than England needed them, then it might be possible for his daughters to marry the heirs of both. In so doing, he could entwine the dynastic future of the house of York not only with those of the French kings, but of the Burgundian dukes and the Habsburgs into the bargain.

  That summer, events seemed to bear out Edward’s thinking. A resurgent Maximilian crushed French forces at Guinegatte in the Franco-Burgundian borderlands. Edward was gratified: his renewed friendship with Burgundy had so far cost him nothing except the acquisition of large quantities of fine Burgundian plate, bought by his agents at knockdown prices from the impecunious Maximilian as he looked to raise funds for his armies. Louis XI, now ageing fast and still recovering from a cerebral haemorrhage that had poleaxed him some months before, was increasingly anxious about the renewed Anglo-Burgundian entente. Which was just how Edward and his councillors wanted it.

  Louis, who had bought off Edward spectacularly at Picquigny some years before, knew that cash was the way to the English king’s heart. Since that time Edward’s reputation for avarice had spread; the Milanese ambassador warned his boss against becoming entangled in a marriage agreement with Edward’s daughters, the English king’s sole interest in the match being the duke of Milan’s exceptional wealth. But when, that autumn, Louis’ envoys offered Edward an annual payment of ten thousand crowns towards his daughter Elizabeth’s expenses, in lieu of Edward’s marriage demands, he swatted it away.

  Edward was engaged in a bigger game now: playing France and Burgundy off against each other. It was a strategy of triangulation that, Edward apparently believed, would allow him to control and profit from the quarrel between the two states, to clean up on the European marriage market and, perhaps, to collect an annual pension from both. Indeed, he offered to mediate in talks between Louis and Maximilian, a self-styled honest broker. Louis, who knew perfectly well what Edward was about, turned him down flat. Nonetheless, Edward was convinced of his own desirability in the eyes of France and Burgundy – and, as long as they were at odds, he had a point.14

  Autumn 1479 saw Edward ensconced in the Surrey countryside at Woking, a sprawling manor that he had once confiscated from the Beaufort family. Others returned cautiously to the still-diseased London, seeking to pick up the threads of their businesses and lives. Among them was the Norfolk knight Sir John Paston who, with his family still mired in their intractable property dispute, arrived in the capital to lobby those close to the king, hoping to obtain royal support for his case. Paston was, he wrote to his mother, in great ‘fear of the sickness’ – the grubbiness of his London lodgings especially worried him – but he tried to put it to the back of his mind. On 5 November he distracted himself drawing up an inventory of his ‘English books’: romances and histories, a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur borrowed from his hostess at the George Inn, and his prized ‘book of knighthood’. By the end of the month, Paston was dead, killed by the epidemic he had feared. He was buried outside the city walls in the church of the Whitefriars south of Fleet Street.15

  Submerging his sorrow in activity, Sir John’s younger brother rode to London to pursue the family’s litigation. Once there, he aimed to speak with William Hastings, the man perhaps closest of all to the king, and to another influential figure increasingly friendly with Edward’s chamberlain, John Morton. But with both men besieged by petitioners and lobbyists there was another – and as far as Paston was concerned, more likely – route to Edward’s ear. This lay through the servants of the king’s chamber: men like Paston’s uncle Sir George Brown, who, in their intimate physical proximity to Edward might have the chance to mention his case on his behalf. For
all his brisk purpose, Paston found his grief for his lost brother overwhelming, almost incapacitating. ‘I have so much more to write’, he told his mother, ‘but my empty head will not let me remember it.’16

  Meanwhile, the diplomatic dance continued. That winter, French and Burgundian diplomats trailed after Edward, who spent Christmas at Windsor before heading downriver to Greenwich, the royal barge rowing hastily through the city. Away at the French court English envoys were turning up the heat on Louis. The Milanese ambassador there, a discerning man, worked out what was going on. The English, he noted, were obsessed with pushing through the Anglo-French marriage: a marriage that, while the threat of English involvement in a new anti-French coalition was still real, Louis could hardly disavow. But the moment the French king succeeded in bringing Maximilian under control, either by force or diplomacy, the marriage would be off. ‘And so’, the ambassador meditated on the sharpness of the relationship between the two kings, ‘diamond cuts diamond.’17

  Another of Edward’s portfolio of marriages looked newly vulnerable, too. Recent months had seen a surge in Scottish raids across the border, threatening the precarious peace between the two countries. The spike in violence had been catalysed by the presence in the borderlands of the Scottish king James III’s disaffected younger brother, the duke of Albany. The previous spring, their relationship had collapsed in a way that had observers of Edward and Clarence nodding knowingly. Opposed to everything the Scottish king stood for (which included peace with the English), Albany did what he could to restore Anglo-Scottish relations to their default setting of chronic hostility. In the spring of 1479, after murdering one of Edward’s representatives and taking several more hostage, he dodged James III’s attempts to arrest and indict him for treason, and fled to France, where Louis XI welcomed him with open arms. The violence continued to escalate. In England, people strongly suspected that Louis, with Albany in his pocket, was up to his old tricks: attempting to distract Edward from any European adventures by creating a distraction in his backyard. It had to be said that Louis could hardly have done a better job than the incapable Scottish king; nevertheless, Edward was not happy.18

  In January 1480, Edward’s envoys presented James with an ultimatum and a list of demands in recompense for various breaches of their truce, foremost among which were that he hand over Berwick and various border towns to which the Scottish king had ‘no right’, and that he send his son and heir south to England as security, to ensure the marriage with Edward’s daughter Cecily went ahead. If he failed to do so, Edward would carry out reprisals.

  These were excessive demands, but Edward seemed entirely serious. As he emphasized, this ultimatum had been made with the advice and backing of his council. The one councillor who had done most to persuade Edward of this sea-change in policy, to convince him that war with Scotland was both desirable and achievable, was the man responsible for the security of England’s northern border – his brother Richard.19

  Since Clarence’s murder, Richard’s stature as the king’s only surviving brother had grown still further. In the autumn of 1479, as he turned twenty-seven, his authority ran throughout England’s northeast. There, the energy and drive of his rule belied his slight, stiff frame and the scoliosis that, unseen by most, was probably now manifesting in a constant background pain along his spine. Now, as his power spread inexorably into all corners of the region, it was to Richard and his council that people turned as the ultimate arbiter of disputes, from property cases to violent assaults. As the oligarchs of York, the region’s elegant political and commercial capital, sought Richard’s ‘good and benevolent lordship’, so his household men obtained plum posts in the city’s corporation and citizens of York found their way into his service.20 The same systole–diastole of Richard’s rule was at work in the great palatinate of Durham, where he made inroads into the authority of the prince-bishops: his servants sitting on the episcopal council, palatinate families bypassing the bishop and looking to Richard for favour, the bishop himself increasingly seeking Richard’s authorization on matters concerning the bishopric – developments that would have had his warlike, independent-minded predecessors spinning in their graves.21

  Aggressive and aggrandizing, there was also a certain upright quality to Richard’s government: the rigid commitment to rule and precept that made him such an effective right-hand man to his brother the king. Having inhaled the principles of good government through his education and the constantly expanding library that he kept by him, ready to consult over any knotty point of procedure or morality, Richard seemed determined to impose them to the letter. Volumes like Colonna’s De Regimine principum stressed the importance of governing truthfully, magnanimously and honourably, with a commitment to the impartial rule of law, the protection of the poor and the common good. The key to such government – as one of the most popular books of advice, the Secretum Secretorum, ‘Secret of Secrets’, put it – was self-government. A prince had to be ‘most of excellence’, had to eradicate vice and ‘shine in virtue’ above all his subjects. This was common, conventional enough advice drummed into most noblemen from childhood. But, more than most, Richard seemed to take it to heart.

  Besides his energetic commitment to the imposition of justice, this striving for princely perfection shone through in Richard’s piety, a spirituality that was no less sincere for being entirely conventional in its expression. It manifested itself in the usual public ways: rigorous enforcement of his household servants’ daily attendance at mass, with punishments for lateness or non-appearance; the disbursement of appropriate financial gifts to churches, chantry chapels and religious houses as he rode about the region; and his foundation of religious institutions. Richard did this charitable work on a scale befitting his role as lord of the north: plans for his new collegiate church at Middleham Castle, drawn up in the summer of 1478, made provision for one hundred priests. His own devotions displayed the self-conscious humility typical of the piety of the age, with its sharp focus on the precariousness of human fortune and the transitory nature of existence. As Richard put it in the preamble to the statutes for his college at Middleham, he was God’s ‘most simple creature, nakedly born into this wretched world’, reliant on God’s grace for his exalted rank and great riches.

  This was a piety in which Richard and his wife Anne Neville consciously and publicly shared. Together, they inscribed their names on the flyleaf of a copy of The Book of Ghostly Grace, the thirteenth-century mystic Mechtild of Hackeborn’s vivid recounting of her revelatory visions: a book of lingering descriptions of the angels, the Virgin and Christ himself, appearing to Mechtild clad in rich heavenly garments, and an aid to private meditation.22

  Richard’s piety reflected his Neville affiliations. Though hardly an intellectual of the calibre of George Neville, one of the figures who had loomed large in his youth, Richard was no slouch either. He followed in Neville’s footsteps, patronizing religious institutions associated with the late archbishop and, especially, finding places in his own household for members of the Cambridge intelligentsia who had populated Neville’s salons. All of which showed a personal commitment to religion that was markedly different in tone from that of his brother Edward, who had never gone out of his way to lead by pious example. It was rather more like that of their father, Richard of York.23

  Richard didn’t always practice what he preached. In York, there were sporadic mutterings about the factionalism and cronyism of the Richard-controlled corporation, one city saddler opining that ‘he did nothing for the common people but grin at us’; while the finance for his college at Middleham dribbled in and eventually dried up altogether. By the late 1470s, though, Richard’s dominance of the northeast was all but total. Feuding and unrest remained, of course, but he proved to be a unifying figure, bringing to a close that most nationally destructive of the region’s turf wars, the feud between the Percy and Neville families. Even Richard’s on–off quarrel with the Stanley family, whose lands bordered his to the west, had b
een reduced to a low simmer: where they had to, he and Lord Stanley swallowed their mutual distaste and got on with the business of government.24 There could be little doubt that this enforced harmony was in large measure down to Richard’s own personal ‘excellence’, as contemporary books of advice put it: a figure whose strong, upstanding leadership inspired loyalty, respect, even love.

  If Richard’s lordship was a contributing factor, there was also no denying that his dominance was a result of who he was – not simply a great magnate, but the king’s brother and representative, a conduit to the heart of royal power. It was a fact of which Richard was always aware, insisting repeatedly that he would proceed only ‘according to the king’s laws’. If God, ‘of his infinite goodness’, had ultimately been responsible for handing Richard his titles and lands, so too had Edward. The king’s continued backing, investing Richard with astonishing authority and lifting him above the region’s other noblemen, had made him what he was. Richard’s rigorous leadership and his insatiable hunger for power, bound up in his quest for self-perfection, did the rest.25 In the early months of 1480, Richard turned his gaze on the kingdom that bordered his dominions to the north, with a sense of possibility.

  Richard hardly needed the Scottish lords’ needling to ramp up hostilities. He shared their frontier state of mind, pricklingly alert to the tensions between feuding families whose cross-border ‘reiving’ or raiding might, with a little government backing on either side, flare into something more significant. Back in 1475, Richard’s lackadaisical attitude towards the Treaty of Edinburgh had earned him a reprimand from Edward. Although he was the king’s chief representative in the region, an Anglo-Scottish peace didn’t suit Richard. War, however, did.26