The Brothers York

by Thomas Penn

  In an effort to underscore the regime’s martial credentials, Edward put on parliamentary record his gratitude to his ‘entirely beloved brother’ Richard for having secured a foothold in the Scottish borderlands, which Richard now aimed ‘to get and subdue’ in future’.24 In the wreckage of the king’s foreign policy, Richard’s modest achievements of the previous summer took on an added lustre. Edward seized desperately at his brother’s triumphs, and at the possibility of further conquest: days before Parliament’s opening, envoys from the Scottish pretender Albany had arrived in London, announcing his fresh defection to England. In order to support Richard in his ambitions of Scottish conquest, Edward now handed him an astonishing grant – one that, he told Parliament, had recently been agreed in talks with his brother.

  First, he conferred on Richard the hereditary wardenship of the West March – the western borderlands with Scotland – along with a large portfolio of estates in the region. This was a prelude to the main event: the creation for Richard of a new county palatine, over which Richard and his heirs would have exclusive and perpetual jurisdiction. While it wasn’t everything it looked at first glance – the county, which consisted of all the land Richard could annex for himself and the English crown in the western Scottish borderlands, as yet only existed on the parchment roll of parliamentary record – it nevertheless confirmed Richard’s unprecedented domination of England’s north. No English nobleman since the Norman Conquest had possessed the power that Edward now placed in Richard’s hands.25

  All of which was consistent with Edward’s ‘family first’ strategy of placing as much power as possible in the hands of those ‘high in the king’s blood’ – for it was they who bore the primary responsibility for ‘the great security, honour, defence and politic governance’ of the kingdom. Where the policy had failed spectacularly with Clarence, Richard was proof positive of its success. Consistently alive to the king’s ‘good pleasures and commandments’, Richard had reaped dazzling reward.26

  That February, a new sumptuary law underscored Edward’s familial vision. The wearing of cloth-of-gold and purple silk was restricted to the king and queen, the king’s mother Cecily duchess of York, his children and his brothers and sisters. Nobody else, ‘of what estate, degree or condition he be’, however exalted in rank, could wear these luxurious fabrics. For Edward there was the family, then a vast gulf and then the rest of the nobility. All this was now evident in parliamentary legislation that represented the latest stage of Edward’s familial carve-up of his kingdom. In Wales and the Marches, where his firstborn son’s household and council – dominated by the queen’s family – held sway, William Herbert, son of Edward’s Welsh ‘master-lock’, was formally removed from the principality that his father had once dominated on the king’s behalf. Even those in the king’s favour suffered, Parliament ratifying the most egregious land grab of recent years: the transferral of the vast estates of the duke of Norfolk to Edward’s second son, whose little child-wife Anne Mowbray, heiress to the dukedom, had died two years earlier. Now, instead of reverting to their original heirs, the lands became the property of Edward’s son – again falling under the control of his mother’s Woodville family, in whose care he was – and, should he die childless, the crown. Prominent among those who lost out was the Norfolk knight John Howard. Over the years, Howard’s loyalty to the regime had been constant. But in this case, at any rate, it went unrewarded. As far as the king was concerned, family came first. Like Herbert, Howard had no option but to put up with it. 27

  As the days lengthened, Edward’s fury subsided into one of the bouts of listlessness, ‘sadness’, with which those close to him had become all too familiar. Physicians and leading councillors alike were concerned about the ‘pensivous thoughts’, the ‘greatest melancholy’ in which Edward was now submerged. If the king’s bingeing and promiscuity formed the underlying cause, they opined, Louis XI’s ‘crafty and fraudulent dealing’ had been the trigger. But it wasn’t just Edward’s mind that refused to function. His body had had enough.28

  On Tuesday 25 March, in Holy Week, Edward made the journey from Windsor downstream to Westminster. There over Easter he fell ill and was closeted away in his privy chamber, unable to move, let alone get out of bed, despite the allure of the great feasting going on elsewhere in the palace.29 Opinion varied as to the diagnosis. One commentator heard that he had gone fishing and had come back with a chill, which had become complicated; another suggested that the malaria Edward picked up on his French campaign had returned with a vengeance. Amid general medical ignorance – Edward, physicians pronounced with authority, ‘was not affected by any known type of disease’ – rumours of poison abounded. Perhaps the most convincing explanation came from Philippe de Commynes away in France. Having already seen his master Louis XI survive an apoplexy, Commynes suggested that the same thing had now happened to Edward, his massive consumption of alcohol and hypertension-inducing lifestyle now catching up with him in one massive cerebral haemorrhage.30

  In the fevered, speculative atmosphere at court the king’s death was reported prematurely by one twitchy agent in the pay of his brother Richard. Carried fast up the Great North Road, news reached York on 6 April. A hastily arranged funeral mass in the Minster the following day was invalidated with equal haste after it turned out the king was still alive.

  Over the next days Edward carried on, prone and immobile but apparently lucid. Surrounded by his coterie of helpless doctors, servants padding silently around his chamber, the bedridden king started to prepare for the death whose approach he had already started to discern. In consultation with the executors – men like John Morton and Thomas Rotherham – who now hovered at his bedside, Edward reviewed the will and testament that he had drawn up back in 1475 before his abortive invasion of France, adding codicils here and there.31 As he put the kingdom in readiness to hand on to his twelve-year-old son, one issue above all gnawed at Edward’s mind: the messy squabbles between certain of his lords, whose control would be rather more tricky for a king on the verge of adolescence, however fine his political education.

  The vendetta most urgently in need of resolution was that between his closest friend Hastings and the queen’s family. Anthony Woodville was away in Ludlow with Prince Edward, so it was Dorset who, along with Hastings, was ushered into the presence of the dying king, his bulk propped up on a mound of pillows. As they stood at his bedside Edward weakly urged them to reconcile for the sake of his sons; then, finding the effort too much, lay down on his right side and gazed up expectantly at the two lords. Moved by the sight of their ailing king, Hastings and Dorset told Edward what he wanted to hear, tearfully clasping hands with each other in mutual forgiveness and reconciliation. Perhaps, at that moment, they convinced themselves they meant it.32

  Two days later, in the early hours of Wednesday 9 April, Edward died. He was a few weeks short of his forty-first birthday. In the glimmering rushlight, air thick with incense, his close servants wept by his bedside. At its head was the confessor to whom the dying king had made his remorseful last confession, promising, desperately, to make amends for any financial wrongs done and debts owed before he was summoned to God to make his own final accounting. He had, remarked an anonymous member of his government, made ‘the best of ends for a worldly prince’ – although, as the same chronicler drily put it, it helped that Edward was ‘carried off immediately’ before he could change his mind. Then the deferential tone was resumed: the late king had, he concluded, put his affairs in order impeccably, and had made ‘full and wise’ arrangements for the succession.

  Yet Edward’s end had come suddenly. It had caught many by surprise and left England with a young monarch who, while widely acknowledged to be kingly material, was not yet of age. The question now, as the late king’s confessor bent over his body, fingers sliding eyelids over his sightless gaze, was how to put those arrangements into practice.33 And, as Edward’s corpse began to stiffen, people’s thoughts began to turn towards the new dispensation,
and their place in it.

  It was still dark when people started to slip out of Westminster with news of Edward’s death. In the depths of the palace, Queen Elizabeth summoned her dead husband’s councillors to discuss next steps. Two were sent to the mayor of London, with orders for him to review the city’s security arrangements in light of the king’s unexpected demise; and messengers were dispatched to Ludlow, to tell Prince Edward that his father was dead and that he was now Edward V, king of England. As bells tolled across Westminster and London, a stream of agents left court carrying the news to nobles and gentry across the country: to Richard, at his Middleham base; and to Hastings’ garrison at Calais.34

  Later that morning Edward’s washed, anointed body, massively naked except for a cloth from his navel to his knees, was placed on a board in Westminster Hall. For some ten hours people filed past, witnessing the fact of his death: members of the late king’s household, lords who happened to be ‘in London or near about’, the mayor of London Sir Edmund Shaw and other city dignitaries. That evening the body was taken away, eviscerated and embalmed with spices, wrapped in fine linen bound with silk cords, then in layers of silk, velvet and cloth-of-gold. Next morning, the coffined corpse was carried into St Stephen’s Chapel, which was draped in black, and placed on a hearse illuminated by thousands of candles. Over the next eight days there unfolded an elaborate sequence of divine offices for the dead sung by the chapel royal, intercessions for the late king’s soul; by night, selected lords and members of Edward’s household, their names drawn up on a watch roll, kept vigil over his body. As they watched, in another part of the palace the royal council, in its customary role as caretaker government, deliberated the transference of power from the old regime to the new.35

  There were some key absences. Most significant were those of the new king’s two uncles: Anthony Woodville, at Ludlow with the king himself; and Richard, still in the north. Also missing were great magnates like the earl of Northumberland and the duke of Buckingham, away on his Gloucestershire estates. Yet around the council table sat a group of experienced royal councillors, loyal to the wishes of the late king whom they had served, and now to his son and heir. Alongside the likes of Edward’s chancellor Thomas Rotherham and John Morton, both of whom had been involved in the recent additions to the royal will, sat William Hastings and John Howard, John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln and the young heir to the duke of Suffolk, and household men like Sir Thomas Montgomery and Edward’s brother-in-law Thomas St Leger. Prominent too were members of the queen’s family, chief among them the marquis of Dorset and, at the head of the table, Elizabeth Woodville herself. Behind her regal poise she was still absorbing the shock of her husband’s death and her new role, at the age of forty-six, as mother to the king of England.36

  Among the councillors there was, in the words of one anonymous commentator – a man then present in the palace, if not in the council chamber itself – complete consensus about what should happen next. ‘All who were present keenly desired that this prince should succeed his father in all his glory.’ In other words, Edward’s young son and heir should be crowned and should rule in person. This keenness was manifest in the early date agreed for his coronation: 4 May, barely three and a half weeks away.

  On the face of it, the crowning of a twelve-year-old might have seemed unusual. But to a council packed with men steeped in legal and historical precedent, and with sharp memories of the dynastic upheavals of recent decades, it was an obvious step. While Prince Edward was a minor, he was by all accounts an intelligent and active boy, who would provide the ideal focus for his subjects’ loyalties. Besides which, there were precedents. The great Edward III had ascended the throne at fourteen, while – an admittedly less auspicious example – Richard II had been crowned at the age of ten. In his will, Edward IV had underscored his desire for continuity: what more continuous than for government to continue seamlessly under his son? Here was a rare chance to effect a smooth handover of power, one in which everything might, more or less, remain the same.37

  The councillors, accordingly, threw their collective weight behind the new king. But, as everybody knew, just because the king was crowned did not mean that he would begin to rule. His majority, indeed, was four years away. In such situations, the precedent of previous royal minorities suggested that a governing council should rule in the boy’s name, until he was able to do so himself. Here, too, the arrangement seemed to make sense. But, as the council got down to business, its fleeting unanimity began to buckle and splinter over the role of the queen’s family in the new regime.

  The problems started with the provision for the new king’s continued upbringing, his ‘government’ or ‘tuition’. His current governor, who had supervised his education for the last decade, was his maternal uncle Anthony Woodville – and indeed, Woodville’s authority over the young boy had been reconfirmed only weeks before by Edward IV. This authority, however, applied to the boy as prince of Wales, not as king. When it was proposed that existing arrangements continue, and that the boy be placed in the custody of his mother’s Woodville family, trenchant objections were raised by a knot of council members. There was no way, they stated emphatically, that the young king should be given into the care of the ‘uncles and brothers on the mother’s side’. Members of the queen’s family, indeed, ‘should be absolutely forbidden to have control of the person of the young man until he came of age’.38

  There was a trace of moral concern in these objections. It was one thing for the Woodville ‘uncles and brothers’ – Dorset and Sir Edward Woodville to the fore – to have been the ringleaders in Edward IV’s life of vice and dissipation; quite another for them to have the rule of his twelve-year-old son. But what concerned the council most of all was to balance conflicting political interests: interests that, in the absence of the late king’s massive centripetal force, threatened to destabilize the government. While Edward was alive, the ‘queen’s blood’ were part of the extended royal family. Now, with Edward’s vast shadow removed, they were exposed in plain sight as a discrete political bloc. Suddenly, Anthony Woodville’s reinforced ‘authority’ over the prince, and his power to raise men in the Welsh Marches, combined with Dorset’s control over the Tower and the royal treasury, assumed – at least for some on the council – an actively menacing valence, as though Woodville custody of the prince threatened to transmute into Woodville control of the kingdom.39 For those old enough to remember the council’s unavailing attempts to control the virulent factionalism of the 1450s, it was essential to avoid a repeat. Unity was vital.

  Quickly, these concerns focused on the upcoming coronation. It would, certain councillors stated, be difficult to preserve a status quo among the lords ‘if those of the queen’s relatives who were most influential with the prince’ – Anthony Woodville and Sir Richard Grey – were allowed to escort the new king to London ‘with an immoderate number of horse’.40 Nobody wanted noblemen and their private armies facing off in London’s streets for control of the boy. The most vocal advocate for restricting the size of the king’s escort, and for the reining in of Woodville influence more generally, was William Hastings. And while Hastings’ views may have been ‘sound’, as the anonymous commentator put it, he had more pressing reasons than most to hold them.

  Days before, Hastings and Dorset had shaken hands over the body of their dying king. As far as Hastings was concerned, the reconciliation was purely cosmetic. The Woodvilles’ position now had worrying implications for his own: should they get their hands on ‘supreme power’, they would ‘sharply avenge’ the injuries he had done them. While the extent of this bad blood was unclear, it was unsurprising that Hastings should feel exposed. All his wealth and power derived from the late king, with whom he could ‘do anything’, in whose all-enveloping shelter he had spent the last quarter-century and alongside whom, in his will, he had stipulated that he should be buried. But Edward was now gone – and, as Hastings knew perfectly well, changes of regime tended to be accompanied by w
ide-ranging reshuffles, in which the new king’s household men took the places and offices of the old. In this case, Edward V’s establishment was currently ruled by the queen’s family, which had a deep-rooted animus against Hastings.41

  Hastings’ anxiety gave force to his protestations. If the new king did not come with a ‘modest force’, he stated flatly, he would ‘flee’ to Calais and await developments there. Nobody present needed reminding of the significance of Hastings’ threat to retreat to a base that had been the springboard for Edward’s own march on London in 1460, and Warwick and Clarence’s rebellion nine years later; a base which, given the continued insecurity on the Franco-Burgundian border, was currently bristling with some fifteen hundred troops, more than double its usual strength.42

  Queen Elizabeth was quick to conciliate. Keen to ‘extinguish every spark’ of antagonism, she assured Hastings that she would write to her son the king, recommending he bring with him no more than two thousand men. With this gesture, Elizabeth acknowledged the council’s concerns about balance and showed that her family, too, wanted unity. After all, it was to the Woodvilles’ advantage for arrangements regarding control of the young king to stay precisely as they were. Given this, reducing the size of the king’s retinue was an easy concession to make. Hastings pronounced himself happy. He was sure that Richard and the duke of Buckingham, men in whom he had ‘the greatest trust’, would bring with them similar numbers.43 Balance would be preserved.