The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  In Calais, tensions were as high as they had been for years. Following Marie of Burgundy’s death earlier in the year, Louis XI had sought to exploit the resulting chaos. With his armies marching towards Flanders, Calais was as usual in the firing line. In between news of shipments and fluctuating exchange rates, the wool merchant William Cely reported how French troops had taken the town of Aire, a day’s ride south of the Pale, and a castle near St Omer ‘by means of treason’; now, they were marching on Gravelines, the key trading post through which English wool exports flowed to Flanders. Soon, Cely feared, the French would control all the overland routes out of Calais, leaving the business community there at the mercy of Louis. Given the situation, it was hardly surprising that William Hastings, head of the Calais garrison, had been a constant presence there since May: the town and its outlying defences bristled with his troops and a newly recruited force of a thousand Kentish archers.2 It wasn’t just the Pale’s external defences that preoccupied Hastings, but – with talk of treason in the air – security within Calais itself.

  That August, Hastings’ agents uncovered a potentially catastrophic security breach: somebody had tried, and perhaps succeeded, in counterfeiting the keys to the city gates. The Calais council ordered a ‘great inquiry’ into the incident, following which blame was placed squarely on the shoulders of the man responsible for the town’s defences: its porter, Robert Ratcliffe. The council, headed by Hastings himself, took no chances. Ratcliffe and all the men in his pay were to be ‘put out of wages’, and were to leave Calais and the marches with ‘wives, children and goods’ by the following Friday ‘on pain of death’.3

  Notwithstanding the febrile atmosphere, the Calais council’s response seemed an overreaction. A trusted Yorkist veteran, Ratcliffe had served in Calais since the early 1470s, and had proved his loyalty to the regime time and again, especially as a naval commander in the recent war against Scotland. He hardly seemed capable of a security lapse, let alone treason. Hastings, though, had eyes and ears throughout the Pale. It was one of these informers, one John Edwards, who had made detailed allegations against Ratcliffe. Edwards had thrown fuel on the fire by alleging that Ratcliffe hadn’t been acting alone. There were other, more powerful figures behind him: the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, and her son Thomas, marquis of Dorset.4

  There was a political edge to the allegations and the Calais council’s uncompromising response. Ratcliffe, Hastings’ man, also had close connections with Anthony Woodville.5 In Hastings’ eyes, it was these increasingly cosy links with the Woodvilles that made Ratcliffe a problem.

  Back in 1471, Edward had handed Woodville the crucial command of Calais, before changing his mind and giving it to Hastings. For Woodville, the loss rankled. He asked for an ‘exemplification’ or official copy of his one-time appointment as Calais’ governor – just in case, at some unspecified point in the future, a chance to reclaim the post might arise. He had apparently gone further, whispering in the king’s ear about Hastings’ unreliability in Calais. Woodville, indeed, may have been the source of talk, back in 1477, that Hastings’ Burgundian sympathies had got the better of him – jeopardizing both Edward’s cordial relations with Louis XI, and Calais itself.

  Dorset was also apparently ‘suborning informers’ to brief against Hastings, going so far as to accuse him of treason, though the friction between the two had a different source. There was much to suggest that the convivial Dorset was muscling in on Hastings’ role as the fixer of all Edward’s desires – and that Hastings, sharply attuned to any challenge to his pre-eminence around the king, didn’t like it. Their mutual antipathy, whetted by a simmering regional rivalry in the east midlands (barely six miles separated Dorset’s manor of Bradgate from Hastings’ Kirby Muxloe), had long been common knowledge at court.6 Back in the spring of 1481, when Hastings left court for Calais, an agent of the Oxfordshire knight Sir William Stonor – then attempting to push forward some business matters with the help of influential contacts close to the king – wrote to his master urgently. Stonor should come to court as soon as he could, ‘for my lord of Gloucester, my lord Chamberlain, be gone, and now here be your friends’. Stonor’s friends were the Woodvilles, above all his brother-in-law, who was none other than Dorset himself. The implication was clear. Hastings and Richard disliked Dorset and his ‘friends’ enough to try and obstruct routes to the king’s favour. With both men absent, Stonor’s way to Edward, smoothed by his Woodville in-laws, was clear. Since that time, things had not improved.7

  All this made Hastings and the Calais council ready to believe the explosive allegations against Ratcliffe, and that he was acting on the Woodvilles’ behalf. It was almost as though Ratcliffe had engineered the security breach in order to discredit Hastings, blame for which would be laid unequivocally at his door. In the robustness of the Calais council’s response, there was more than a hint of the bad blood between Hastings, Anthony Woodville and Dorset. And when the case was quickly referred to a high-profile panel at Westminster – Hastings’ informer John Edwards was hustled in front of the king and a group of his close councillors including Morton, Montgomery and the ever-reliable earl of Essex – there was a sense that Edward was moving to smooth over this growing friction between three of his leading subjects before it got out of hand.8

  In the hearing that followed, Edwards retracted his original allegations with emphatic speed. He claimed that he been coerced into making the story up ‘of his own false imagination’, and threatened with ‘the brake’, the rack, unless he complied. He had made the allegations ‘for fear of his life’: they were, he confessed, a pack of lies, ‘utterly false and untrue’.9 If true, Edwards’ tale painted a picture of factionalism that had taken root at Calais: that Hastings or his supporters were trying to concoct smears against the Woodvilles and those close to them, to paint them as unreliable, disloyal and a threat to national security. In Westminster, through the king’s swift and independent arbitration, the matter was shut down, Anthony Woodville and Dorset officially exonerated.

  Yet such accusations were not washed away quite so easily, as the queen’s family knew all too well. Back in 1469, allegations of witchcraft against Elizabeth and her mother had stuck, to near-catastrophic effect. For the Woodvilles, the nerve endings were still raw. Later that autumn Anthony Woodville, ever-sensitive to public opinion, wrote to his attorney general, the Middle Temple lawyer Andrew Dymmock, enclosing the text of Edwards’ confession to the king’s council. He instructed Dymmock to make more copies for circulation, together with a protestation of innocence on behalf of himself and ‘my lord marquis’, which was to be ‘made up in as sure form as can be’.10 If Woodville and Dorset had been cleared, the allegations of treason had done their work. Though Edward had interposed his intimidating form between his noblemen, the Woodvilles’ quarrel with Hastings bubbled on.

  After a leisurely few weeks on pilgrimage to the north Norfolk shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, Edward returned to London. By mid-October he was at the Tower, closeted away with his close councillors, discussing international affairs. Since the summer, the sclerosis had deepened. Edward’s baleful attitude towards Scotland, carefully nurtured by Richard, now manifested itself in his demand for the repayment of his daughter Cecily’s dowry. With it, Edward stamped out any lingering hopes of her marriage to the Scottish heir, once the hoped-for foundation of a new peace between the two kingdoms.11 Across the Channel, Edward also continued to do nothing, ignoring Maximilian’s frantic pleas for English military aid, pocketing his French pension and waiting for Louis XI to die. Even a desperately ill Louis, however, was capable of mischief. That autumn, he published the secret treaty agreed with Edward the previous spring. In the great cities of Flanders there was horror. Constitutionally disinclined to war, they had always resisted Maximilian’s military ambitions. Now, with Louis’ treaty proof positive that their English ally was prepared to abandon them at the drop of a hat, they clamoured for Maximilian to come to terms with the French king.12
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  To add to the general muddiness, there emerged from Edward’s council meetings yet another vague notion of military action against France, the king ordering Hastings, Anthony Woodville and Dorset to form a working party to explore various options.13 Perhaps it was nothing more than an attempt by Edward – as always, invoking the idea of a French war in order to resolve domestic dissent – to corral his bickering nobles into some kind of unity. That, and the time-honoured excuse to raise cash.

  Late that autumn, Edward invited the new mayor of London, William Heryot, the city’s aldermen and a number of carefully vetted citizens to hunt with him in Waltham Forest. A prosperous merchant, Heryot had a track record of showing ‘pleasures to the king’. A notable donor to the regime, he had partnered with Edward on various business initiatives: Edward was keen that his willing attitude should rub off on his fellow Londoners. After shooting the king’s deer in the company of a number of household knights, the assembled Londoners were brought to a newly built hunting lodge, where they were wined and dined, working their way through ‘all manner of dainties’ washed down by a variety of Gascon wines from the king’s cellar. During the feast Hastings made cheery table talk on Edward’s orders; following the meal, the Londoners were privileged with a sodden afternoon’s hunting in the company of the king himself. Typically, too, the king remembered the absent ladies: in the days following, gifts of venison and a tun of Gascon wine arrived for the wives of the city’s notables.14

  Here was the king in his element: a nod and smile here, a ‘good word’ there, his intimacy edged with calculation. This was the corporate environment in which Edward had always thrived, and which had come to encapsulate the character of his reign. Content to get, spend and consume, luxuriating in his own charismatic majesty, Edward’s rule combined bonhomie, greed, rapacity and – through the haze of his excesses – a narrow-eyed watchfulness, alert to financial irregularities and wandering loyalties alike. Not that anybody contemplated disloyalty – at least, not in public. Under the practised charm, the threat of a terrifying, indiscriminate violence lay ready to erupt against anybody who crossed the interests of the king or his family. This was what Edward’s rule had come to – and, for some, especially its beneficiaries, these blurred, limited horizons were enough. England was at peace, with itself and with its neighbours, ruled by a solvent and more or less functioning king. If that meant a country held tight in the grip of the royal family and an autocratic monarch who, all ambition spent, seemed content to let his kingship spool out in an endless round of self-pleasure and the empty repetitions of a worn-out foreign policy, so be it.

  Christmas that year, at Westminster, seemed to one onlooker even more extravagant than usual, a display of opulence befitting a ‘mighty kingdom’. The preparations had involved an extensive renovation of various ‘ruinous buildings’, a new privy kitchen, and the installation of a new great chamber in Queen Elizabeth’s apartment complex, no expense spared.15 The palace was ‘filled with riches’: cupboards adorned with the contents of Edward’s jewelhouse on public display, glinting richly in the candlelight; tapestry-lined walls, including the king’s latest acquisition, a vast multi-piece arras depicting the history of Thebes, newly imported from Flanders for the princely sum of £300; cellars fully stocked with wine. Enjoying the festive hospitality was an international guest list including ‘men from every nation’, underscoring England’s place at the centre of world events.

  At the heart of the festivities was, of course, the family. On show was the dynasty’s future, Edward and Elizabeth’s ‘handsome and delightful’ children. Foremost among them were the two princes – Edward, recently turned twelve, a confident boy whose sophisticated education enhanced his natural authority; and his nine-year-old brother Richard – together with their older sister, the blonde, beautiful sixteen-year-old Elizabeth, and the king’s bastard son Arthur Plantagenet, a boy of ‘virtuous and lovely disposition’.16 The king, though, was not to be upstaged.

  Always sensitive to the latest fashions, that season Edward appeared in public in a succession of the ‘costliest clothes’, in head-turning style: the robes with full sleeves, styled after the ‘monastic frock’, their insides lined with the most luxurious of furs. This new wardrobe, declared one bystander, had a sensational impact, the king displayed ‘like a new and incomparable spectacle’ – though, he added, the king naturally ‘always stood out because of his elegant figure’.17

  It was this last observation that gave the game away. Edward’s habit of showing himself off in lingering public displays and walkabouts had turned into a distorted self-parody. He seemed oblivious to the extent to which his ‘fine stature’ had become bloated with years of gorging; oblivious, too, to the fact that onlookers praising his regal appearance did so with tongue firmly in cheek.18 In the last days of December, though, came a hammer-blow against which Edward’s self-love was no protection at all.

  On 23 December 1482 in the city of Arras, Louis XI and Maximilian finally came face to face: Louis ill and frail, the youthful Maximilian exuding barely disguised frustration. Sick of the Burgundian duke’s inability to offer any kind of governance in war-torn Flanders, the Flemish cities of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres had taken matters into their own hands, negotiating a peace with the French king. That day, Louis and a reluctant Maximilian put their signatures to a peace treaty in which ‘all rancors, hatreds and malevolences’ between the two warring princes were to be forgiven. At the treaty’s heart was a marriage between Maximilian’s two-year-old daughter Margaret and Louis XI’s son and heir Charles – the boy who had been previously, and in Louis’ case unwillingly, promised to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth. In wording that dripped with condescension, it was Louis’ ‘pleasure’ that the king of England be included in the new agreement. This was window dressing. Edward had had no involvement in the treaty at all. He had been blindsided.19

  Edward shouldn’t have been surprised. For years, his envoys and advisers had been telling him that Louis was using every trick in the book to entice Burgundy away from an alliance with England. But in playing Louis and Maximilian off against one another, Edward had characteristically convinced himself of his own desirability, that both princes needed him more than he needed them. Increasingly, though, Edward’s foreign policy vacillations had become the projections of his own inner turmoil – and, perhaps, his inability both to relinquish the idea of an aggressive, conquering England and to put that idea into practice. Edward had effectively been negotiating not with his neighbours but with himself. Now, reality had intruded. As the light poured in, it dawned on Edward that, in the great game of international power politics, he had been spun along by Louis – the king on whose imminent demise he had been relying – and, finally, snared in his web.

  Edward’s once-special relationship with Burgundy was in tatters. To add insult to injury, two of the noblemen on the pro-French regency council of Burgundy, now mandated to govern the principality, were the sons of Edward’s old ally Louis of Gruuthuse, and the Bastard of Burgundy, whose joust against Anthony Woodville some fifteen years previously had appeared to herald a new dawn in Anglo-Burgundian relations.20 Ripped apart too was the French marriage alliance over which Edward had obsessed, that of his daughter Elizabeth to the dauphin. His brusque rejection of the Scottish marriage now looked horribly premature, especially as James III had refused to return his dowry. Worse still, the taps of Edward’s French pension had now been firmly and conclusively turned off. Humiliated on the international stage, his dynastic plans in shreds, Edward was ‘deeply troubled and grieved’, a grief quickly transmuted into a vicious, vindictive rage.21

  That January, as Parliament opened in a wintry Westminster, a small printed pamphlet was doing the rounds. Called ‘The Promise of Matrimony’, it had come from the press of a Flemish printer named William de Machlinia. From Mechelin – or, in its French iteration Malines, the adoptive home town of Edward IV’s bibliophile sister Margaret – Machlinia had set up shop on Fleet Street near the inns of c
ourt, specializing in the printing of lawbooks. Although a legal document, ‘The Promise of Matrimony’ was far removed from his typical output. It stitched together two contracts. First was the nuptial agreement – the so-called ‘Promise’ of the title – signed by Edward and Louis at Picquigny back in 1475; the second was a recently obtained copy of the Treaty of Arras, in which Louis, so the English narrative went, had broken the marriage contract behind Edward’s back. Combined, they amounted to a damning portrayal of French perfidy: a simple and powerful piece of rhetoric clearly intended to whip up anti-French antagonism and win support for a new round of parliamentary taxation for a war against France. Back in 1472 Edward’s then chancellor, John Fortescue, had done something similar in conjunction with the manuscript copyshops of Paternoster Row. This time, Edward – or rather, his chancellor John Russell, a man with a deep appreciation of the printed word – had enlisted the power of new technology to create the first known piece of printed political propaganda in English.22

  As usual, Edward had done everything to ensure a complaisant Parliament. The house of Commons was stuffed with MPs loyal to the regime’s key figures. Anthony Woodville, writing to his attorney-general Andrew Dymmock, had urged him to fix parliamentary seats for five of his own retainers and advised him to ‘get yourself one’ into the bargain. In addition, the speaker, John Wood, a veteran Exchequer official, was a royal servant steeped in financial knowhow.23

  In a regal harangue Edward revealed to the Commons ‘the whole series’ of Louis XI’s ‘great frauds’, perhaps brandishing Machlinia’s pamphlet as he did so, and asked them to help him ‘take vengeance’ on France. The tactic worked: a tax was duly voted – along with a tax on wealthy foreigners, which always played well.

  War, though, was a chimera, and everybody knew it. For all his fury, there was no chance of Edward mounting another invasion of France. As had been abundantly clear in his failed campaign of eight years before, the resources needed were so substantial, the preparation so complex, that even the most generous parliamentary tax wouldn’t cover it – and this time, Parliament hadn’t been particularly generous. Given his track record, Edward didn’t dare ask for more. As he put it lamely to Parliament, vengeance on France was to be exacted ‘as often as opportunities of time and circumstance might permit’: hardly a ringing declaration of war.