Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (60 page)

So the new king had to shore up his defences, as far as that was possible, partly in order to prevent the French from taking advantage of any internal confusion. He brought many previous Lancastrian supporters under the cover of his good lordship, principally by granting them territory; he was forced to trust, and to favour, those who had offended against him. Where the Lancastrians could not be reconciled, they were arrested or eliminated. The earl of Oxford and his son, for example, were beheaded at Tower Hill on charges of treason.

A commission of judges proceeded through twenty-five shires and eight cities in order to pursue political malcontents. No great set-piece battles were being fought but, in the first two years of his reign, there was probably more fighting than in any other period of the war; in 1461 he took under his control the estates of 113 enemies. This was the territory granted to his supporters. In that year he also created seven new barons.

The king then found it convenient to create a foreign crisis; it helped him to raise money for his own purposes and to unite his subjects in common enmity. In the spring of 1462 he claimed that the new king of France, Louis XI, was set to destroy ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English of this our said realm’. Edward can be considered the first English king who eschewed France altogether; he had no French possessions to defend, other than the garrison town of Calais, and was truly king of England only.

In the following year the exchequer was asked to provide the requisite funds to raise an army and a fleet against his manifold enemies at home and abroad. It was supposed that the king would march against the Lancastrian supporters in Northumberland and elsewhere, or that he would invade Scotland; in the event, none of this came to pass. He did not lead his troops into battle. ‘What a wretched outcome,’ one fifteenth-century chronicler reported, ‘shame and confusion!’ Yet it would be wrong to consider Edward as an inactive king. He arranged truces both with France and with Scotland. He took his court to York, and from there he supervised the slow domination of the northern shires.

From the beginning Edward proved himself to be a strong king; he was an expert administrator and had concluded that the survival of his throne depended upon financial and political stability. In an age of personal kingship this was necessarily a very heavy burden on the monarch, whose presence was required everywhere and whose authority had to be imposed directly. He kept a close scrutiny on commerce and on his customs revenues; he summoned members of the London guilds in order to guide or harangue them. Thousands of petitions were delivered to him every year. It was said that he knew ‘the names and estates’ of nearly all the people ‘dispersed throughout the shires of this kingdom’, even
those of mere gentlemen. A king who had won his throne by force could not be aloof or detached; he had to remain at the centre of human affairs. He needed goodwill as well as obedience. That is why Dominic Mancini described him as being ‘easy of access’. It has been said that Edward began the movement towards the ‘centralized monarchy’ that characterized the Tudor period; but in truth he had little choice in the matter. It was not a bureaucratic or administrative decision; it was personal instinct.

He had an interest in the administration of justice, too, and in the first fifteen years of his reign he travelled all over the kingdom for his judicial visitations. In the first five months of 1464, for example, he attended the courts at Coventry and Worcester, Gloucester and Cambridge and Maidstone. Several reasons can be adduced for this activity. Pre-eminent among them was his effort to check or punish violence between the noble families; he had a personal interest in preventing riot or disorder that might threaten the security of the various counties. He intervened in a struggle between the Greys and the Vernons of Derbyshire, for example, and closely interviewed the retainers of both sides. He made much use of the commission known as ‘oyer et terminer’, designed to hear and determine felonies or misdemeanours in an expeditious manner. It was composed of his own men, from the household or from the court, and of local magnates who could not be easily coerced.

The commissioners were not always successful, however, in summoning witnesses. The senior knights of Herefordshire confessed to them that ‘they dare not present nor say the truth of the defaults before rehearsed, for dread of murdering, and to be mischieved in their own houses, considering the great number of the said misdoers . . .’. In the early years of Edward’s reign, when the final outcome of the struggle between the Yorkists and Lancastrians was still in doubt, private violence had by no means abated.

The king’s own legal practice, however, was far from perfect. He regularly interfered with the process of the courts to ensure favourable judgments in the interests of his most powerful supporters. He never prosecuted the retainers of those men upon whose loyalty he relied. This was of course not an unusual procedure for any king, whose rule relied more upon
realpolitik
than any judicial
principle. Edward also had a vested interest in efficient or at least swift justice, since the revenues of the courts greatly augmented his income.

Another aspect of his character can be noted. One contemporary chronicler remarked that he had a liking for ‘convivial company, vanity, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyment’. These do not seem to be mortal offences in any king but, rather, the proper setting for the projection of authority and sovereignty. In the next sentence, after all, the chronicler goes on to praise the king’s acute memory and attention to detail. Yet Edward made one decision in his private affairs that had more serious consequences. In the spring of 1464 he secretly united himself with a commoner in a marriage that emphasized his passion rather than his judgment. Elizabeth Woodville was a widow with two children; and, unlike most royal brides, she was English. She was not altogether common, however, since her father was a knight and her mother a widowed duchess. It was reported that, having decided that she would be a queen rather than a royal mistress, she had resisted the king’s advances. Edward was known to be libidinous and to have had many sexual liaisons, but it seems that Elizabeth was the first to have refused him. A rumour spread through the courts of Europe that in desperation he had even put a knife against her throat. Yet she held out, to her ultimate satisfaction.

The king’s choice was a cause of some dismay to those who believed that a king should only marry someone of royal blood. The fact that he married her in secret, slipping away from his courtiers on the first day of May 1464 with the pretence of going hunting, suggests that he himself knew that he had married beneath his rank. It was also believed preferable to marry a virgin. A newsletter from Bruges in the autumn of 1464 observed that ‘the greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied at this and, for the sake of finding means to annul it, all the nobles are holding great consultations in the town of Reading where the king is’. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, had already begun negotiations with the French king on the matter of Edward’s marriage to Louis XI’s sister-in-law. Those plans were
now in disarray. The ‘consultations’ of the lords, however, were meaningless. As a friend of Warwick remarked, ‘we must be patient despite ourselves’. On 29 September 1464, Warwick and the duke of Clarence, the king’s younger brother, escorted Elizabeth Woodville into the chapel of Reading Abbey where she was honoured by the assembled company as their lawful queen.

In the following summer Henry VI was captured; since the defeat at Towton he had retreated to Scotland and to the various loyalist castles of northern England. He was effectively a king in hiding, and such was his invisibility that Edward was not sure in which county he was being concealed. Margaret, in the meantime, had taken refuge on her father’s lands in Anjou. The old king was seen at a dinner given by his supporters in Ribblesdale; he fled the area, but was betrayed by a monk. He was eventually caught in a wood known as Clitherwood, just on the border of Lancashire, and taken back to London on horseback with his legs tied to the stirrups; it is reported that he wore a straw hat, and was pelted with rubbish by some abusive citizens. He remained in the Tower for the next five years, with a small party of courtiers enlisted to serve the prisoner known only as Henry of Windsor.

The new queen’s family, the Woodvilles, were in the ascendant at court and might be seen to threaten the position of Warwick and the other Nevilles. The king also arranged a series of marriages between Elizabeth’s immediate relatives and various available aristocrats; since she had five brothers and seven sisters, this diminished the prospect of further patronage for many more distinguished families. Her younger brother, for example, was married off at the age of twenty to the sixty-five-year-old duchess of Norfolk; the duchess was a wealthy widow who had already buried three husbands, but she also happened to be the aunt of Warwick himself. Warwick’s feelings at what was described at the time as a ‘
maritagium diabolicum
’ are not recorded. He would have been justified in thinking, in the language of the time, that the honour of his family had been disparaged and that his elderly relative had been made to look ridiculous. In fact the old lady outlived her young spouse, who ended on the scaffold. Louis XI disclosed the fact that he had received a letter expressing Warwick’s dismay at Edward’s behaviour; he hinted that Warwick might even try to supplant
his sovereign, but all is lost in a mist of diplomatic surmise and posturing. The French king was not known for nothing as ‘the spider king’.

A more tangible source of discord can be found in the foreign affairs of the nation. Warwick wished above all else for an alliance with France, while Edward favoured an accommodation with Burgundy and Brittany. Various strands of policy were involved. Warwick was receiving many favours from Louis XI, while the Woodvilles were related to the noble families of Burgundy. Burgundy was also the largest market for English cloth, and thus the principal trade partner of the English merchants. In any case the French were the ancient enemy who at this time were harbouring ambassadors from Margaret of Anjou.

In 1467 a commercial treaty was signed between England and Burgundy, swiftly followed by a peace accord and by the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to the duke of Burgundy. In his defeat and disappointment Warwick retired to his estates in Yorkshire, where it was rumoured that he had begun conspiring against his sovereign; it was said that he had been able to suborn the duke of Clarence in a plot against the throne. A French chronicler, Jean de Waurin, reported that Warwick promised Clarence that he would give him his brother’s crown. The old allies had fallen out.

Other rumours were circulating in the spring and autumn of 1467. The most astonishing of them was that the two inveterate enemies, Warwick and Margaret of Anjou, would enter an alliance and would invade England with the purpose of destroying Edward IV. It is not clear who proposed the bargain, but many observers suspected that the French king would do anything to stir up unrest and riot in the enemy country. Warwick and his kinsmen still attended the English court, however, and appeared to be on amicable terms with the king himself.

The break came in the summer of 1469. In June a rebellion in the northern shires was fomented by ‘Robin of Redesdale’ alias ‘Robin Mend-All’ alias Sir John Conyers who was a cousin of Warwick himself; it was in part a popular rebellion, inspired by those who were discontented with Edward’s rule. The king was on pilgrimage to Walsingham, but on hearing news of the gathering insurrection he broke off his pious journey and marched with his
retainers to Nottingham. He was hearing rumours from all sides of the treacherous designs both of Warwick and of his own younger brother; it was also reported that Warwick’s brother, George Neville, the archbishop of York, was part of the insurrection. In a defiant spirit he wrote to the three of them, demanding their unconditional loyalty to confirm the fact they were not ‘of any such disposition towards us, as the rumour here runneth’.

No such news reached the king. He was informed instead that the duke of Clarence was about to marry Warwick’s daughter, despite the fact that he had already forbidden the union, and that the parties concerned were sailing to Calais for the ceremony. It was a clear act of defiance and disobedience.

From Calais, Warwick and his associates then issued a proclamation in which they took the part of the northern rebels against a king who was being governed by ‘the deceivable covetous rule and guiding of certain seducious persons’; the last adjective suggests a modern mingling of seductive and seditious. These suspect persons were of course the Woodvilles, who had already been asked by the king to return to their home territories for safekeeping. Warwick invited his supporters to meet him at Canterbury on 16 July. It is possible that he intended to declare Edward illegitimate and to replace him with Clarence. This was not a struggle between Yorkists and Lancastrians, but between two factions of Yorkists.

Warwick and his newly aggrandized forces crossed the Channel and marched upon London, where Warwick himself was very popular; then they made their way towards Coventry, where they determined to join the men in league with Robin Mend-All. The king’s army came up to challenge them, but a sudden attack by the rebels forced them to disperse. Some of the commanders of the king’s army were taken on Warwick’s orders, and in a gratuitous act of injustice he beheaded them on the following day.

Edward himself was by this time on the road to meet his army, and did not learn of its defeat until it was too late to turn back. His men promptly deserted him. This is the best to be made out of a confused narrative. He decided to turn back to London, accompanied by a small retinue, when he was surprised by the forces of the archbishop of York. The king was taken, with all due courtesies, and promptly confined to Warwick Castle. Two of
the most prominent members of the Woodville family, the father and younger brother of the queen, were captured and beheaded on Warwick’s order. He now controlled both the country and the king.