Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (11 page)

Edward refused to listen to the earl’s reasoning. Early in the morning on 1 May 1464, Edward departed the court in secret. Why he did so, no one would find out until four months later, but the consequences of his actions that May morning would be politically explosive. Edward had married Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Sir John Grey, who had
died fighting for the Lancastrians at St Albans in 1459. Her mother was Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the aristocratic princess who had been married to the Duke of Bedford; Jacquetta had then gone on to marry Elizabeth’s father, Richard Woodville, a humble member of the gentry. For a king to marry a commoner was unthinkable, let alone a woman who was four years older than him with two children from her previous marriage; when the king publicly announced that he was already married in September, the council was astounded, protesting that ‘she was not his match, that however good and fair she might be, she was not a wife for so high a prince as he’. Edward would hear none of it. Clearly infatuated with his new bride, chroniclers wrote in amazement how they spent ‘three or four hours’ in bed, with some even claiming that Elizabeth had used witchcraft or sorcery to place a spell upon him. Still, for the old nobility like Warwick, accustomed to the order of rank and dignity, matters were about to get much worse.

The arrival of Elizabeth Woodville at court could scarcely have been greeted with greater controversy. Ambitious and determined to obtain advancement for her family, the new queen set about providing for her twelve brothers and sisters. Within a month of the royal marriage, her sister Margaret had been betrothed to the Earl of Arundel’s heir; this followed with successive marriages for her sisters to the Duke of Buckingham and the heirs to the Duke of Exeter and the Earl of Kent. When her twenty-year-old brother John married the Duchess of Norfolk, in her sixties and on her fourth marriage, the court recoiled at the sheer indignity of the grasping family, prepared to make such ‘diabolical’ unions, all it seemed, for the sake of greed. It did not help matters that the duchess was in fact Warwick’s aunt, but it was the planned marriage of Thomas Grey, Elizabeth Woodville’s son from her first marriage, to Lady Anne Holland, the heiress to the Duke of Exeter, that caused Warwick’s ‘great and secret displeasure’ since Lady Anne had previously been betrothed to the son of Warwick’s brother, Lord Montagu. For the earl, a pattern was beginning to emerge: his family’s influence was beginning to be slowly eroded by the upstart Woodvilles, as Warwick’s uncle Lord Mountjoy was replaced as treasurer by Elizabeth’s father, the newly created Earl Rivers. Warwick’s position as premier nobleman and power-broker was under threat from a group of parvenus.

It was not merely his status at court that concerned Warwick; the
earl had earned a significant reputation at the courts of Europe as the most powerful man in England, to whom Edward IV owed his throne: as one foreign chronicler remarked, Warwick ‘might also be called the King’s father as a result of the services and education he had given him’. Louis XI was intrigued by Warwick, and in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the earl, during the course of several embassies during the 1460s, had won him over to the idea of an Anglo-French treaty. When instead Edward, influenced by Earl Rivers, began to favour a treaty with Burgundy, England’s largest trading partners, it was a public humiliation for Warwick, whose influence and control of the king had been exposed as a sham.

Relations between Edward and Warwick worsened when it was suggested as part of an agreement that Edward’s sister Margaret of York should marry Charles, Count of Charolais, the eldest son of Duke Philip of Burgundy, while Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence should marry Philip’s daughter Mary. Warwick was aghast. He had hoped that, without a male heir, and with the Woodville clan claiming most available aristocratic marriages for their own (indeed every English earl who had an available heir to marry had chosen for them a Woodville wife), he would be able to marry his two daughters to Edward’s younger brothers, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

Warwick had done much to flatter the two young men. Like Warwick, both brothers had been ‘sorely displeased’ at their brother’s marriage, and had to witness the unedifying spectacle of their mother Cecily having to kneel in homage before the new queen at court. Warwick had taken Richard into his household as one of his ‘henchmen’ in 1465, where he was trained in the arts of war at Warwick’s castle at Middleham in north Yorkshire. Yet Richard was still a boy, too young to have much influence at court; to begin with, Warwick’s target was Clarence, the heir presumptive to the throne, in whom the earl would seek to fulfil his ambitions.

One chronicler wrote a circumstantial account of how in the autumn of 1464, shortly after Edward’s announcement of his marriage, Warwick invited George, then aged fifteen, and Richard, aged twelve, to Cambridge where he suggested that Clarence should marry his eldest daughter Isabel, and Richard his younger daughter Anne. When
Edward discovered what had happened he summoned both boys to his presence, where they were ferociously reprimanded. For Edward, a marriage between Warwick’s daughter and Clarence was out of the question. Clarence was heir presumptive; Edward and the Woodvilles would hardly allow Warwick’s influence to extend to becoming yet another kingmaker.

For Clarence, the king’s refusal to allow his marriage was an uncomfortable bridle. He had no other reason to be dissatisfied with his own position, having been appointed as the King’s Lieutenant in Ireland in 1462, while in 1464 he had been endowed with the lands of the Earldom of Chester, traditionally reserved for the Prince of Wales, enriching his wealth to around £3,666 13s 4d a year. But it seems that, encouraged by Warwick, ambition had got the better of him.

By 1467 Warwick was once again pursuing the duke, complaining to him how Rivers and the Woodvilles controlled the court; offering to make Clarence King of England or governor of the realm, he told the duke that the entire country would support him. It was clear that some agreement had been reached when, as Jasper Tudor planned his attempted invasion in Wales, rumours circulated that a plot was planned at court. A shoemaker named Cornelius, under torture in the Tower confessed that several Lancastrian sympathisers had been conspiring with Margaret of Anjou, including Lord Wenlock, a close friend of Warwick’s, and John de Vere, the thirteenth Earl of Oxford, Warwick’s brother-in-law. Confessing his innocence, Oxford, whose own father had been executed as a traitor six years previously, was lucky to escape with his life. Others were not so fortunate. Several were charged in May 1468 for having plotted, with Margaret of Anjou, the ‘final death and final destruction’ of Edward IV and, found guilty, executed.

Further insult was heaped upon Warwick when his brother George Neville, the chancellor and Archbishop of York, who had been working hard to gain a papal dispensation for Clarence and Isabel’s marriage, was sacked from his position as chancellor after he refused to meet representatives from Burgundy. Edward was determined to press ahead with his sister’s marriage to Charles, and despite the dowry costing a ruinous 200,000 gold crowns (£41,666 13s 4d), the marriage took place in Flanders in July 1468, ‘much against’ Warwick’s wishes, who now developed a ‘deadly hatred’ of Charles. Warwick understood that
the marriage and alliance, which had brought England into partnership with Brittany and Burgundy, were part of a prelude to war against France. Two months before, the king had announced to Parliament that, with the new alliance with Burgundy, he intended to wage war on ‘his old and ancient adversary’, for which he obtained a substantial grant in taxation. In August Edward agreed to send 7,000 archers to assist the Duke of Brittany against France, and during the autumn months a fleet was actively being prepared at Portsmouth, ready to sail as part of a planned invasion of France to take place the following year.

In fact, in a calculated gamble, Louis had himself made peace with Brittany and Burgundy in October 1468, making any invasion practically impossible. For fear of humiliation, Edward hid the truth, claiming that Margaret of Anjou was preparing to invade England from Harfleur; he spent £18,000 on ordering the fleet to patrol the Channel instead. It was this kind of waste that confirmed contemporary writers’ opinions that taxpayer’s money was being frittered away, that law and order were breaking down with ‘great riots and oppressions done to our subjects’, with the king’s councillors, especially the Woodvilles, enriching themselves at the expense of the common people. It was in this explosive atmosphere that rebellion broke out in the north in the spring of 1469, led by one ‘Robin of Redesdale’. Robin’s real identity may have been Sir William Conyers, the brother of Sir John Conyers, the constable of Warwick’s castle at Middleham. In a familiar echo of the revolts of the 1450s, manifestos were circulated calling for the deposition of the king’s evil advisers, in particular the Woodville clan. Worryingly, another rumour began to circulate that Edward himself was a bastard and that Clarence should be the rightful King of England.

In spite of initial attempts to crush the rebellion, the ‘mighty insurrection’ began to move south, numbering an estimated 20,000 men. When news of the rising unrest reached Edward, he decided to move north, waiting at Fotheringay Castle for reinforcements to arrive. These were slow in assembling, and when it became clear that none would be ready in time, Edward withdrew to Nottingham Castle to wait for Welsh troops that had been promised by William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. With the situation deteriorating daily, on 9 July, Edward wrote to Warwick and Clarence, both of whom had suspiciously not yet
offered any military support, demanding that they show their loyalty. He received no response.

Five days earlier, Warwick, together with his daughter Isabel, Clarence and his brother-in-law the Earl of Oxford, had crossed the seas to Calais, where on 11 July, Warwick’s daughter Isabel was married to Clarence in a hastily conducted ceremony. Warwick was now prepared to finally reveal his hand: issuing a declaration remarkably similar to the rebels’ own, he stated his intention to save Edward from ‘the deceiving covetous rule and guiding of certain seditious persons’, named as Rivers, the Earls of Pembroke and Devon, who had caused the ‘great poverty’ of the realm, ‘only intending to their own promotion and enriching’. Warwick landed at Canterbury on 16 July, receiving an enthusiastic welcome as he continued his march to London. Edward remained at Nottingham, still in the hope that Pembroke’s army would reach him in time. Meanwhile, Robin of Redesdale’s army continued to march southwards, intending to join with Warwick who had entered the capital.

William Herbert had departed from Wales with a large number of cavalry and infantry drawn from his Welsh estates, assuming that the Earl of Devon would later join him with a force of archers. Devon never arrived. The separation of the two forces was to prove fatal at Edgecote field near Banbury, when confronted by the lethal combination of Robin of Redesdale’s rabble of an army and a reinforcement provided by Warwick’s troops and Herbert’s Welsh men-at-arms, both outnumbered and with no archers to protect them, were hacked down and overrun, suffering heavy casualties. Herbert and his brother were captured and taken to Northampton where they were beheaded the following day on Warwick’s orders, without any legal justification.

Herbert had marched out of Raglan Castle with a formidable army of Welshmen. Joining him had been the twelve-year-old Henry Tudor, who would have witnessed the devastating outcome of the battle at Edgecote at first hand. In the panic of defeat, he was taken from the battlefield by Sir Richard Corbet, a gentleman who was married to a niece of Herbert’s wife Anne Devereux, the Countess of Pembroke. In a later petition written by Corbet to Henry, Corbet declared that he had first served him ‘after the death of the Lord Herbert after the field’,
when he had been one of the men who had ‘brought your grace out of the danger of your enemies’.

When news of the battle reached Margaret Beaufort, then residing at her husband Henry Stafford’s residence at Woking, in her anxiety she sent out messages to discover what had happened to her son. Although she had been separated from Henry since the fall of Pembroke Castle in 1461, Margaret had been allowed to remain in contact with her son, corresponding with him and visiting him on occasions, for instance in September 1467, when together with her husband she visited Henry, having paid ten shillings at Bristol to be taken across the Severn by boat to Chepstow where she travelled on to Raglan to be entertained for a week as Herbert’s guests.

Hearing the news of the devastation of Herbert’s forces at Edgecote, Margaret assumed that Henry must still be at Raglan. She sent her servant William Aykerig to ride immediately to Worcester, passing on a message for John Bray to ride to Raglan ‘to my lord of Richmond’. Bray then travelled with his page from Worcester to Raglan, only to find he was not there.

Henry had in fact been led from the battlefield to the home of Herbert’s brother-in-law Lord Ferrers, at Weobley in Herefordshire, where Bray arrived six days after beginning his panicked journey. There he found Herbert’s widow Anne Devereux sheltering under her brother Ferrers’ protection, where she had continued her duty of looking after her dead husband’s ward.

Margaret’s immediate concern was for the welfare of her son. Her household books record how twenty shillings was ‘given in reward to Davy that waiteth upon my lord Richmond by my lady commandment at Weobley’ with a further 6s 8d ‘in reward to master Starky and to Richard Eton for my lord of Richmond’. If Henry was shaken from his experience, he recovered quickly enough to return to his archery practice, and was provided with twenty shillings by his mother ‘for his disports to buy him bow and shafts’.

Warwick was not content with just William Herbert’s destruction. In the aftermath of his triumph, Earl Rivers and his son Sir John Woodville, the husband of the elderly Duchess of Norfolk, were executed without trial, while other Woodville supporters, rounded up in hiding,
soon met their deaths. It was a pyrrhic act of revenge. Unless Warwick, who claimed to be acting in the king’s best interests, was prepared to depose Edward, replacing him with either Clarence or Henry VI, the earl could achieve little else. He had achieved his ambition of bringing the Woodvilles to heel, but what next? Without the support of the nobility, who had observed the summer’s events with horror, Warwick could do nothing. He was caught in a trap of his own making.