Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (18 page)

It seemed, the Crowland Chronicler believed, an ‘honourable peace’. But for many members of the nobility, realising what had taken place, the treaty was anything but honourable. In agreeing to a peace with France, Edward had left his brother-in-law Charles the Bold to be hung out to dry. Gone was the promise of military glory and the spoils of victory, the booty and expensive ransoms of French prisoners that many would have hoped to have earned. A peace was not what they had crossed the Channel for; for some, Edward’s volte-face was too much to bear. The young Henry, Duke of Buckingham, withdrew from the expedition entirely and left for England together with his retinue before the negotiations at Picquigny were concluded. Yet the dissatisfaction at the king’s capitulation struck right at the heart of Edward’s government. Commynes wrote that when it came to arranging a formal
interview with the French king, ‘the Duke of Gloucester, the King of England’s brother and some other persons of quality, who were not pleased by this peace, were not present at this conference’. For the first time, the king’s younger brother Richard, usually a loyal mainstay of his realm, had chosen to publicly show his dissatisfaction with his brother’s decision, though Commynes admitted that Richard, accepting the fait accompli, ‘reconciled’ himself to the peace, and shortly afterwards visited Louis at Amiens, where he accepted ‘some very fine presents, including plate and well-equipped horses’.

Edward returned home to face the criticism that he had failed to wage a successful war, that taxation had been misspent, and that the king himself had acted dishonourably in letting down Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Yet it had been Charles himself who, due to his military commitments in Lorraine, had failed to deliver upon his promise to Edward of providing a full Burgundian force to fight France. It was to prove a costly mistake; by the end of the year he had launched a war against the Swiss, a viciously fought conflict that ended in Charles’s death at the battle of Nancy in January 1477. Five years later, after Mary of Burgundy died falling off her horse in 1482, the Treaty of Arras resulted in the Duchy of Burgundy being subsumed into France, while the ducal title descended to Mary’s son Philip the Fair. If there was one winner from Picquigny, it was undoubtedly Louis XI; calculating that the costs of Edward’s pension was a small price to pay for peace, he was later heard to boast that ‘I have chased the English out of France more easily than my father did; for he had to drive them out with armies, while I have seen them off with venison and good French wine.’

Edward could at least take consolation that the peace brought to a conclusion the problem of Margaret of Anjou, who had been imprisoned in the Tower since 1471; handed over to Louis upon payment of a ransom and the condition that she renounce her claim to the English crown and her lands in England. She lived on for another six years, suffering the further humiliation forced upon her by Louis to give up all claims that she had inherited from her father, René of Anjou. Living out her days in poverty and as a shadow of her former self, this exiled queen remained the sole testament to the fading memory of Lancastrian rule.

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The terms of the treaty of Picquigny had included a promise from Louis XI that he would refrain from invading Brittany, a promise for which Edward now hoped Duke Francis would thank him. With this expectation of gratitude in mind, Edward decided to return to the vexed issue of Henry Tudor’s exile in Brittany. The sudden death of Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, while he was returning with the king’s army from France had once more narrowed the bloodline of possible Lancastrian claimants to the throne: Exeter had been the grandson of Henry IV’s eldest sister, and on his return journey he had drowned at sea, leaving no heir.

While Henry Tudor remained in exile, Edward believed that the Yorkist dynasty could only be secure once he was captured. In spite of the birth of a second son, Richard, in August 1473, in addition to his heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, Edward could not forget that Henry was ‘the only impe now left of King Henry the 6
^th
s blood’, whose survival left the king in ‘perpetual fear’ that his own dynasty might one day be challenged.

With the new treaty signed, Edward turned his mind to removing this one remaining thorn in his side. Once again the king sent ambassadors to Francis at Nantes, headed by the Chester herald Thomas Whiting, with a large sum of gold to ease the negotiations. Ordered to report that Edward wished to arrange a marriage for Henry with one of his ‘affinity’, by which means the prospect of civil war would finally draw to an end, they requested that Henry should travel back to England with them. Francis listened to the ambassadors courteously; after they had spoken, he repeated his well-worn arguments that, having sworn a promise to his captives, he ‘might not lawfully’ release Henry. The ambassadors persisted, pressing Francis with ever greater sums of money for his compliance. Eventually the duke, ‘wearied with prayer and vanquished with price’, agreed to hand over Henry, having been convinced that Edward intended to marry the earl to his eldest daughter Elizabeth of York.

Henry was taken from Largoët, where he travelled with the English ambassadors to St Malo, where a ship was waiting to embark on the journey to England. Henry’s fate seemed to have been sealed. In the hands of Edward’s ambassadors, his return to an uncertain fate in England seemed inevitable. Henry seems to have understood the
consequences of his sudden uprooting: in his ‘agony of mind’ or perhaps in dissimulation, he ‘fell by the way into a fever’, delaying their departure.

It would prove a crucial delay. It seems that Francis’s decision to allow Henry’s return to England had been taken without consultation with members of his council: when the news reached the Breton court of the duke’s capitulation, many were shocked, none more so than one of Francis’s trusted councillors Jean du Quelennec, Vicomte du Fou and admiral of Brittany since 1432, ‘a man of such reputation among the nobles of Brittany’. When Quelennec discovered what had occurred, he rushed to the court, where he presented himself to the duke, his appearance so grave and ‘very sad and heavy without speaking’ that Francis demanded to know what was wrong.

‘Most noble duke,’ Quelennec is supposed to have answered, ‘this paleness of countenance is unto me a messenger of death.’ Francis had forgotten the promise he had given, he argued, and instead delivered ‘that most innocent imp, to be torn in pieces by bloody butchers, to be miserably tormented, and finally to be slain’. When Francis denied it, Quelennec pressed the duke: ‘Believe me most noble duke, Henry is almost lost already, whom if you shall once permit to step one foot out of your jurisdiction, all the world shall not after that be able to save his life’.

At length Francis was persuaded by Quelennec to change his mind and reverse his decision. There was no time to lose: three days had already passed, with the ambassadors’ departure, taking with them their precious cargo, imminent. Francis immediately sent his treasurer Pierre Landois to halt the ship setting sail. With ‘great celerity’ Landois arrived at St Malo where with ‘long talk’ and ‘counterfeiting some business’ managed to delay the ambassadors’ departure. Discovering Henry ‘almost dead’, Landois arranged in secret for the earl to be conveyed to a secure sanctuary in one of the chapels within the town. When the English ambassadors discovered what had happened, they were furious; not least concerned for their own safety, ‘thus spoiled both of money and merchandise … they should not return home altogether void’.

Desperate to prevent their catch from slipping out of their grasp, the ambassadors decided to lure Henry out of sanctuary. When they
arrived at the chapel, however, they were met with a hostile reception from townsmen who had surrounded the chapel, determined that Henry’s rights of sanctuary would be observed. In further negotiations, Landois claimed that it was through the ambassadors’ own negligence that Henry had managed to enter sanctuary, yet gave a promise that the earl ‘should either be kept in sanctuary … or else should be committed to ward again with the duke, so as there should be no cause to fear him’.

When the ambassadors returned bringing news of Henry’s near capture, Edward was ‘very sorry’, though he was ‘eased’ by the promise that the earl would remain under ward. With the threat of his capture lifted, Henry’s illness miraculously cleared and ‘pretty well amended’, the earl returned to the ducal court. Still, the threat of uncertainty remained; Henry remained too valuable a prize for other courts in Europe not to take an interest in seeking his possession. Louis XI continued to pressure Francis for both Tudor exiles to be released; when he discovered that Henry had narrowly escaped being handed over to Edward, the French king was disturbed enough to send a new mission led by the admiral of Guinne, Guillaume de Souplainville, to Nantes just before Christmas 1476, with de Souplainville being ordered to demand from Francis that Henry and Jasper be handed over to him. Met with a flat refusal, he returned to France empty-handed in early 1477. Faced with an increasingly hostile French king who, regardless of his promises given in treaties, seemed bent upon ending Brittany’s independence, Francis understood that one day he would need to come to terms with Edward’s demands and decide the fates of his Tudor captives.

The money Edward had acquired from his French pension, together with the commercial returns which ended a restriction in trading between English and French merchants, leading to an expansion in the cloth and wool markets, had left him ‘an extremely wealthy prince’. The king was even able to live off his own revenues, which coming after years of Lancastrian profligacy, was a remarkable achievement; with his kingdom at peace and his rivals silenced, one chronicler considered the years of his reign after 1475 as ones of ‘glory and tranquillity’.

The one exception to this newfound tranquillity was the king’s brother George, Duke of Clarence. He had never recovered Edward’s
trust after his defection to the Lancastrians, but the king could not ignore the fact that his brother was of royal Yorkist blood, and as such he felt duty-bound to recognise the duke as the pre-eminent nobleman in his realm, allowing him to inherit his wife’s vast Neville inheritance and forcing his younger brother Richard to surrender the office of Great Chamberlain to Clarence after the duke had complained to the king that it was more deserving of his status.

Edward’s attempts at reconciliation with his brother had come in the face of Clarence’s continued intractable nature. Throughout the 1470s, his loyalty remained suspect; there were rumours that he had stayed in contact with the Earl of Oxford, while behind the scenes he attacked the king’s policies. Slowly, one chronicler observed, ‘each began to look upon the other with no very fraternal eyes’. Clarence had also never come to terms with Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, making no secret of ‘his bitter and public denunciation of Elizabeth’s obscure family’; in doing so, he set himself aganist the queen who ‘remembered the insults to her family and the calumnies with which she was reproached’. According to the Italian Dominic Mancini, ‘she concluded that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne, unless the Duke of Clarence were removed; and of this she easily persuaded the king’. In the end, however, it proved that Clarence alone would become the author of his own destruction.

Clarence had accompanied Edward to France, but on his return his behaviour became erratic, especially after the death of his wife Isabel in childbirth in December 1476. ‘It was noticed,’ the Crowland Chronicler observed, ‘that the duke was gradually withdrawing more and more from the king’s presence, hardly uttering a word in council, not eating and drinking in the king’s residence.’ When in April 1477 he arranged for the abduction of a former servant in his household, convinced he had killed the duchess by giving her ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’, having him tried and summarily hanged at Warwick Castle, Edward realised that his brother had become dangerously unhinged. A month later, when an Oxford astrologer was arrested for attempting to use magic against the king, under torture he confessed that a member of Clarence’s household, Thomas Burdett, had been involved in creating a horoscope that calculated the deaths of the king and the Prince of Wales. Both were tried and found guilty on 20 May and taken to Tyburn
where they were hanged, drawn and quartered. Clarence’s mistake was to question the decision not privately, but in public, insisting that the condemned men’s declarations of innocence be read out to the council. Edward was furious, deciding his brother had tried his patience too far. Within a month, Clarence was arrested and placed in the Tower. When Parliament convened the following January, Edward had decided there would be no second chances for his wayward brother. The charges against Clarence were vague and unsubstantiated, but there would be no doubt that the king’s will would prevail: the duke was convicted of treason. After the speaker of the House of Commons demanded an immediate execution, Clarence was dispatched on 18 February 1478, the method of his death remaining mysterious, with Dominic Mancini writing a few years later that ‘the mode of execution preferred in this case was that he should die by being plunged into a jar of sweet wine’.

If Richard disagreed with Edward’s treatment of his brother, which amounted to nothing less than judicial fratricide, he remained silent. He had stuck loyally to his brother throughout; in contrast to Clarence, his fidelity to the king never wavered, following Edward into exile in Flanders and returning with him in triumph, fighting in both battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury. Victory had brought Richard the spoils of war, namely the offices, estates and perhaps above all influence exerted by the Earl of Warwick in the north. Now, with Clarence’s death, Richard would reap further reward, with his son Edward being created Earl of Salisbury, one of Clarence’s titles, three days before the duke’s murder; six days after, Richard was reappointed as Great Chamberlain and given a greater share of the late Earl of Warwick’s inheritance that had previously been denied him. Richard and Clarence had argued bitterly over the inheritance, since both were married to Warwick’s daughters who had claim to the lands, to the point that one foreign observer reported that Richard ‘was constantly preparing for war with the Duke of Clarence’. But brotherly disagreements did not mean that Richard would willingly accept his brother’s execution. According to Mancini, he was ‘so overcome with grief’ that he was ‘overheard to say that he would one day avenge his brother’s death’. He withdrew to his estates in the north and, according to the Italian observer Dominic Mancini, who had arrived in England in the early 1480s, was rarely seen at court; preferring instead to keep ‘himself within his own lands’.