by Thomas Penn
The abortive invasion of France three years previously had only increased Richard’s itch to lead an army into battle. A Scottish campaign would be an opportunity to further his reputation as a war-leader; more to the point, it would consolidate his hold in the north, where the idea of conflict against Scotland was more or less a reflex, and even extend his rule into Scotland itself.
On the face of it, war with Scotland made little sense for Edward. A diversion from his negotiations with France and Burgundy, it would be a drain on his finances into the bargain. But Edward, his thoughts gently led by his brother, was irate at the dishonour done him by the Scottish king – and, perhaps, he recalled the prophetic notion in which England and Scotland would be united in one Yorkist Britain. Besides which, he now seemed inclined to give Richard free rein. His brother had demonstrated his qualities of loving obedience time and again. If he now wanted to fight a war against Scotland using his own northern forces, that was fine by Edward. It would be a useful outlet for Richard’s belligerence; the upsides were glory and territorial gain for the house of York. In May 1480, with James III having failed to meet any of his demands, Edward handed Richard the post of the king’s lieutenant-general in the north, and with it the power to raise an army.27
Meanwhile, Louis XI’s evasions were becoming ever more desperate. When, in the latest attempt to keep the French king to his commitments, an English delegation arrived in Paris, he retreated behind a shower of gifts and excuses and fled the city.28 The episode made up Edward’s mind for him. Where Louis equivocated, the ailing Burgundian state had proved eager for Edward’s friendship, a stream of Burgundian diplomats – old, reassuringly familiar faces from Edward’s exile a decade before – beating a path to his door. Driving this renewed charm offensive was the dowager duchess of Burgundy, Edward’s sister Margaret.
In recent years, Margaret had done everything possible to draw Edward into the conflict with France, playing the family card time and time again. Edward had been stolid in the face of his sister’s entreaties, unmoved even by a desperate, reproachful letter of March 1478, in which she described how she had been deserted by everyone, ‘especially by you’. On 24 June, Margaret left Flanders for talks with her brother, talks that, she hoped, would lead to a new Anglo-Burgundian alliance. It would be her first return to England in a decade. Whether Edward actually wanted an alliance, or whether he just wanted to twist Louis’ arm with the threat of military action, was unclear. But he was prepared to show his sister ‘great pleasure’, with no expense spared.29
In early July Margaret and her entourage were met at Calais by the queen’s youngest brother Sir Edward Woodville and a hundred of Edward’s household men, crisply uniformed in jackets of Yorkist mulberry and blue, embroidered with white roses. On the royal ship Falcon, the Burgundians were taken across the Channel and round the Kentish coast under heavy escort to Gravesend; from there, transferred to a royal barge, they were rowed up the Thames to London.30
All poised Burgundian glamour, Margaret was embraced warmly by the family whom she hadn’t seen for so long, and in some cases – her nephews, Edward and Elizabeth’s young sons – not at all. She was escorted to her lodging, the great house of Coldharbour on Thames Street, where Edward’s gift of ten fine horses adorned with exquisitely worked trappings awaited her. A welcome banquet at Greenwich was attended by many of the family, among them her mother and fellow guest of honour Cecily, the dynasty’s matriarch, and Richard, who had left the Scottish border to make the long journey south to see his sister. As she looked about her, Margaret could hardly have been more conscious of the one glaring, unspoken absence: that of her favourite brother, Clarence. But Margaret knew what she was in England for. She praised the king’s wine – Edward, gratified, sent her a barrel a few days later – and concentrated on the job in hand.31
That summer, Edward and his court went out of their way to articulate the bond between Burgundy and the house of York. The king flaunted his Burgundian credentials. His expensively acquired Flemish tapestries adorned the walls of his palace; also on display were eight exquisitely illuminated manuscripts, newly sourced from the ateliers of Bruges and Ghent and transformed into objects of Yorkist luxury. Adorned with Edward’s coat of arms, and those of his two sons, the books had been bound and ‘dressed’ under the supervision of his wardrobe keeper Piers Curteys: the edges of their pages gilded, covered in crimson velvet, blue and black silk, with gilt clasps engraved with white roses, and laces and tassels supplied by the London silkwoman Alice Claver. Meanwhile, Edward had chosen the courtiers deputed to attend on Margaret carefully, with an eye to their Burgundian sympathies and literary credentials: Thomas Thwaites, the treasurer of Calais and a noted bibliophile; William Hastings and his brother-in-law Sir John Donne, who some years before Margaret had presented with a Deeds of Alexander the Great in the vain hope that he might intercede with Edward on her behalf; and Anthony Woodville, with whom Margaret found common ground in, among other things, their shared Burgundian heritage and their patronage of William Caxton.32
This shared cultural landscape appeared to translate into an abundance of political will. The talks went well and by 1 August a succession of secret documents, their terms concluded by an experienced negotiating team including John Russell, bishop of Rochester, Lord Stanley and the ubiquitous Thomas Montgomery, were drawn up. The chief signatory was Richard. But if Margaret had hoped that Edward would curb his deal-making instincts in favour of family sentiment, it was wishful thinking.
In order to get her brother’s commitment to a fresh Burgundian alliance, including a force of six thousand English archers – recruited, naturally, at Burgundian expense – and the house of York’s guaranteed backing in the event that Burgundian talks with France broke down, Margaret had little choice but to give Edward everything he asked for.33 This included underwriting Edward’s annual pension of 50,000 crowns in the event that Louis stopped paying it, and – the cornerstone of the new alliance – the marriage between the Burgundian heir Philip, who had just turned two, and Edward’s four-year-old daughter Anne. Edward, still stung by the memory of the vast sums that Charles the Bold had wrung out of him for Margaret’s own marriage back in 1468, insisted that he pay no dowry. Even so, Edward still believed he was doing his sister a favour. After dinner one late July evening, he handed Margaret a dispatch from John Howard, fresh from the French court: a panicky Louis XI was now prepared to give in to all Edward’s demands if he promised not to sign a new treaty with Burgundy. But, Edward soothed his sister, there was no way he would make another agreement with the French king.34
If Edward was inured to Louis’ diplomatic shenanigans – ‘dodges and lies’, as Howard put it dismissively – he was less alert to Maximilian’s whimsy. In late August, Margaret was still in England when news came that the Burgundian ruler, a prince who Machiavelli later judged to be impossibly fickle, had wandered off and concluded an independent truce with Louis with a view to a lasting peace with France. The rest of Margaret’s stay was an exercise in damage limitation: smoothing Edward’s ruffled feathers, assuring him that there would be no further secret discussions with Louis, and keeping the Anglo-Burgundian treaty on track while supervising the hiring and shipment of a force of English archers to Flanders. Finally, after a weekend’s entertainment on Anthony Woodville’s Kentish estates en route to Dover, Margaret made her farewells and sailed for Calais.
Not long after, the veteran envoy Chester Herald returned from the French court. Chatting with one of the king’s secretaries, he gave an unvarnished account of Louis XI’s reaction to the news of Edward’s alliance with Burgundy. The French king, ‘fantastically angry’, had raged against Margaret, ranting that she had hated him ever since he had refused to support Clarence’s ‘treasons’ against Edward. In his fury, Louis had initially refused to see the herald and his fellow envoys. Then, calming down, he had summoned them in, and presented them with proof of his own secret understanding with Maximilian, along with copies of supposedly confidential corr
espondence between Edward and Burgundy that Maximilian had subsequently passed on to Louis. On being told this news, the envoy added with understatement, ‘Edward had marvelled’.35
Rather than clarifying the diplomatic situation, the new treaties simply added to the haze of mutual suspicion between the three rulers. These were conditions in which Louis thrived. That autumn, despite his professed ‘understanding’ with Maximilian, he again mobilized an invading army against Burgundy – his troops ‘on the front all ready’, as one panicked Calais merchant reported. He also cancelled planned peace talks with Maximilian – talks that Edward, playing to his role of ‘honest broker’, had been keen to mediate – and refused to pay any more instalments of Edward’s pension.
Louis had called Edward’s bluff. In massing his forces against Burgundy, the French king dared Edward to get off the fence and side openly with Maximilian, as his recently signed treaty demanded. Aware that this irrevocable step would result in the loss of his French pension and the Anglo-French marriage for which he continued to hold out, not to mention committing himself and England to a potentially ruinous war in France, Edward couldn’t bring himself to do it. Besides which, he had another conflict to deal with. After months of phony war with Scotland, it had sparked into life.36
In September Richard had returned north to news of a massive Scottish raid along the Northumbrian coast as far as the castle of Bamburgh, which was torched. There were rumours that the raid, led by an ally of the exiled duke of Albany, was guided by the unseen hand of Louis XI, a distraction to stop Edward meddling in the conflict between France and Burgundy. If so, it worked to perfection. Nobody was happier to escalate the situation than Richard, eager for war. His reprisal raids had the hapless James III urgently begging Louis for military aid and artillery, and sending envoys to Westminster in a fruitless last-ditch effort to avoid conflict. That November, at a belligerent meeting of his great council, Edward decided to invade Scotland. What was more, perhaps stirred by hazy memories of his northern campaign nearly twenty years before, the king declared that he would not leave matters to Richard but would lead the army himself.37
Edward’s announcement was a game-changer. No longer was the campaign simply a question of Richard assembling his northern forces. Rather, it involved mobilizing a national army, a process that would require massive planning – and massive funds. Though Edward was now solvent, the finance at his disposal was hardly enough to bankroll a prolonged military campaign: troops’ wages, munitions and supplies, and a supporting navy to ferry them up the coast. Given the residual public hostility over the fiasco of his French invasion, he could hardly approach Parliament for financial backing. Instead, he resorted to the creative fundraising that, from the moment he acceded to the throne, had been a hallmark of his kingship. This time, its centrepiece was a new ‘benevolence’: another round of forced loans and gifts extracted from England’s taxpayers under the guise of voluntary, public-spirited contributions to the king’s wars.
If the previous benevolence, collected in the run-up to Edward’s French invasion of 1475, was dressed in at least a pretence of negotiation with donors, this new initiative cut straight to the chase. Anybody worth more than 20 marks was to contribute; anybody failing to do so would, it was strongly implied, be sent to fight in the north. This time round the process, under the direction of the king’s council rather than the royal household, was more systematic, more rigorous, more intrusive. Commissioners fanned out across the country, examining potential donors and compiling extensive lists of names and contributions that were returned to the council, in order that – the phrase carrying with it a faint air of menace – ‘we may know and understand the behaving and merits of every person in this behalf’. Supervising the benevolence were experienced financiers like the queen’s receiver-general John Forster and, unnamed but hovering in the background, John Morton.38
In the spring of 1481, as Edward’s commissioners assessed, documented and collected, invasion plans were drawn up, and supplies and weapons stockpiled. Meanwhile, Edward gently deflated the hopes of his new Burgundian allies, informing them that owing to his Scottish war he was unable to fulfil any further promises of military aid against France. What he didn’t tell them was, in the latest convolution of his increasingly baroque diplomacy, he had quietly reopened back-channel negotiations with Louis XI. If such thinking was flexible, it was also increasingly tortuous: a product of the enduring mistrust that riddled relations between Europe’s princes, and of Edward’s persistent belief that he could both have his cake and eat it.
Initially, Edward’s approach seemed to pay off. That winter, Louis had suffered his second stroke in as many years. Despite his scheming, the French king remained anxious about the prospect of Anglo-Burgundian co-operation, and he jumped at Edward’s informal offer of reconciliation, which came as a discreet message from William Hastings.39
Hastings was back on the diplomatic scene after some months in his east midlands heartland, where he had been catching up with the regional big men and the coterie of legally minded business advisers and estate managers who, like all noblemen, he employed to look after his lands and interests. Satisfied that things were well in hand – men like the Northamptonshire lawyer William Catesby, effectively his second-in-command in the county, had everything covered – Hastings spent much of his tour poring over plans for the redevelopment of his ancestral home of Kirby Muxloe into a magnificent crenellated vision in brick and glass, surrounded by an ornamental moat and deer-filled grounds. By the winter, Hastings was back at Edward’s side, actioning the latest of his foreign policy contortions and, in March 1481, sending his ‘thoughts’ on the importance of peace between England and France to Louis. As Louis knew perfectly well, Hastings’ thoughts were Edward’s own.40
Agreeing to everything Edward asked, including his marriage demands, Louis again turned on the taps of his French pension. Edward, accordingly, continued with his plans to invade Scotland. He appeared to think that Louis had genuinely changed tack; that the French king now wanted to embrace the marriage treaty that he had spent the last six years trying to avoid. Given the French king’s approach of balancing ‘sheer weight of cash’ with ‘dodges and lies’ – a strategy with which Edward and his advisers were long familiar – this seemed optimistic at best.
With spring came the first act of Edward’s Scottish war. In recent years, the king had invested heavily in England’s once negligible navy; now, he reinforced what was already a formidable seaborne force with nine new vessels. Squadrons of warships patrolled the Dover Straits and the west coast of Scotland; meanwhile English privateers, with a nod and a wink from the government, opportunistically hunted down Scottish shipping. In mid-May, a fleet under the command of John Howard nosed out of Sandwich, waved off by an enthusiastic Edward and his ten-year-old heir, and sailed up England’s eastern seaboard towards Scotland on a softening-up expedition, prior to the land invasion that was to take place later in the summer.41
Howard had ensured that his three-month tour of duty would be as comfortable as possible. His flagship, the Mary Howard, was crammed with necessaries: rugs, tapestries, featherbeds, pillows stuffed with down and fine linen, a silver ‘pissing basin’, silver dishes and cutlery, a case with four glass goblets, and – to liven up the monotonous on-board fare – ‘a pannier of spices’ and five sugar loaves. He also took clothes for all occasions, including a jacket of cloth-of-gold and one of ‘popinjay colour’. To while away the long stretches of time on board ship, he had with him several barrels of white wine and malmsey; his chess boards and ‘a bag with chess men’; and a portable library of twelve books, all in French, including strategic military reading like the ever-popular Tree of Battles, and two books on dice and chess.42
Just over three weeks later Howard’s ships materialized in the Firth of Forth, spreading panic and mayhem. In a lightning sequence of raids, his troops burned towns and villages all the way up to the key port of Leith, destroying a number of ships and captur
ing eight others. Having obliterated Scotland’s naval power, he returned to Newcastle to await news that Edward’s army was on the move. And there he waited.43
Meanwhile, Edward’s mobilization had gone smoothly. His inner circle was well represented: Anthony Woodville had recruited a thousand men and his nephew Dorset six hundred; Lord Stanley, in a demonstration of his regional muscle, contributed three thousand archers. With the Scots divided, disorganized and underfunded, now was the time for Edward to strike. Despite continued bellicosity, however, he stayed put.
In the north, Richard and the earl of Northumberland waited with their assembled forces for Edward’s main army to join them: Howard remained in port with his fleet, ready to escort supply ships when the signal came. Weeks, then months ticked by.44 Finally, in mid-July, Edward rode unhurriedly west out of London and up the Thames to Windsor, where he stayed for over a month assembling his armies and hunting. Then, amid incessant summer rain, he dawdled further up the Thames valley to his Oxfordshire manor of Woodstock.
The window of opportunity for an invasion was fast closing. Late in August, with Edward nowhere in sight and Howard’s ships long since returned to their Kentish base, Richard and Northumberland laid siege to the key border fortress of Berwick. As the Scots – growing in confidence with each day that passed with the non-appearance of the English army – surged across the border ‘in great number’, Northumberland wrote urgently to his followers for reinforcements. Edward was still three hundred miles away at Woodstock, hunting and working his way through the eighty butts of malmsey ordered ‘for the use of him and his army’. On 22 September he, his commanders and a ‘multitude of men’ rode over to nearby Oxford, their sunset entrance to the city illuminated by a forest of burning torches, where they spent the following days being wined and dined as guests of the university’s chancellor, the queen’s brother Lionel Woodville.45 Eventually, in early October, Edward arrived in Nottingham, still two hundred miles away from the English front line. With winter approaching, he eventually decided against leading his army into Scotland and instead returned south. By the end of the month, he was back in the comforting surroundings of Greenwich.