Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (63 page)

On 4 July 1475 a large force of English troops sailed for Calais from Dover, prepared to meet up with the Burgundian forces. Edward was accompanied by the majority of the nobility, together with 15,000 men. He carried with him 779 stone cannon balls and more than 10,000 sheaves of arrows; he also transported cloth of gold, for sumptuous display, and ordered the building of a small house made of wood and covered with leather which he could use on the battlefield. It was a portable royal chamber.

Charles the Bold did not live up to his name, however, and arrived at the garrison town with only a few supporters. He had left most of his men engaged in the siege of a town in Flanders. Edward, apparently moved to great fury, almost immediately began talks with Louis XI in order to broker some kind of peace. The French king was eager to oblige, not wishing for the distraction of foreign soldiers on his soil, and a month later the two kings met on a bridge at Picquigny near Amiens.

A wooden barrier had been placed in the middle of the bridge, to ensure against any surprise attack, and the soldiers of both sovereigns were massed on either side. An impersonator, wearing the clothes of the French king, walked beside Louis. Three of Edward’s retinue were dressed in the same cloth of gold as their sovereign. It was a precaution. Edward approached the barrier, raised his hat and bowed low to the ground; Louis reciprocated with an equally elaborate gesture. ‘My lord, my cousin,’ Louis said, ‘you are very welcome. There is nobody in the world whom I would want to meet more than you’. Edward replied in very good French.

A solemn treaty was signed in which Louis agreed to pay the English king the large sum of 75,000 crowns as well as an annual pension of 50,000 gold coins on condition that English troops left the country. Satisfied by what amounted to a bribe, Edward returned to England. It was also agreed that his eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, should marry the French king’s eldest son. In the usual manner of these arranged royal marriages, the proposal came to nothing.

Edward returned richer if not exactly more glorious. He had
said in advance of the expedition that he wished to regain English possessions in France and even to advance himself upon the French throne. This was the rhetoric of the period, and was not necessarily believed. In any case the ambitions were misplaced. But if Edward had sailed with every intention of extorting a bribe from the French king, his mission had been admirably successful. Some evidence for this comes from a French historian who was with the court of Louis XI at the time. Philippe de Commynes states that Edward had begun to negotiate with Louis even before he left Dover. Commynes then goes on to speculate that Edward wanted to keep for himself all the money he had raised in England for the royal expedition.

In that event he had been engaged in an act of dissimulation on a very large scale; in the months before the planned invasion, the patent rolls reveal the combined efforts of ‘carpenters, joiners, stonecutters, smiths, plumbers, shipwrights, coopers, sawyers, fletchers, chariot-men, horse-harness men and other workmen’ in preparation for war. The truth may be that the English king was ready for a range of different results. He was simply waiting on events, to see what chance or fortune would throw in his way on the principle that when nothing is ventured nothing is gained. The historical record is made up of unintended consequences and unexpected turns of fate.

Edward did not publish all of the principles of the treaty made at Picquigny; but it soon became clear to the parliament house and the people of England that, as a result of the abortive French expedition, the king had been made richer and they had been rendered poorer. Yet Edward now was too strong to withstand.

He soon deployed that strength against his own brother. Clarence had effectively become ungovernable. According to the
Crowland Chronicle
, the most reliable source of information for the period, he ‘now seemed more and more to be withdrawing from the king’s presence, hardly uttering a word in council, not eating and drinking in the king’s residence’. He had some cause for disaffection. On the death of his wife, after childbirth, it was suggested that he should marry the daughter of Charles of Burgundy; Edward refused to countenance such a union, because with
the support of Burgundy, Clarence would become too powerful. For similar reasons Edward would not permit Clarence to marry the sister of the king of Scotland.

In April 1477 Clarence accused one of his wife’s attendants, Ankarette Twynyho, of having murdered her mistress with ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’; an armed gang of his men seized the unfortunate woman and took her to Clarence’s town of Warwick where she was hanged. It was a form of judicial murder. Three months later one of the squires of his household was charged with necromancy in pursuit of the king’s death and, on being pronounced guilty, was drawn to the gallows at Tyburn. On the following day Clarence came to the royal council and caused to be read a proclamation of the man’s innocence; Clarence then withdrew. He had effectively challenged the king’s honesty as well as his system of justice. Edward therefore summoned Clarence to appear before him and, in the presence of the mayor and aldermen of London, declared that he had acted ‘as if he were in contempt of the law of the land and a great threat to the judges and jurors of the kingdom’.

At the beginning of 1478 a session of the parliament house was summoned where, in front of the lords, the king accused his brother of various crimes against the throne; some witnesses were called, but it was clear that they had been instructed in advance. The duke defended himself as best he could, even pledging to endure trial by combat, but the assembled lords declared him to be guilty of treason. The lords of the parliament were no doubt bound to support the king’s wishes in the matter, and did not need to be duped into delivering their verdict. Yet the evidence was weak and perhaps concocted. Clarence was taken to the Tower where, a few days later, he was murdered by surreptitious means. It has often been stated that he was drowned in a butt of malmsey wine; this curious detail may, oddly enough, reflect its accuracy. It might indicate, however, that he was drowned in his bath; bathtubs were often made out of sawn-down wine barrels.

The king had killed the elder of his two brothers by dubious means. It was an act of ruthlessness that sealed the supremacy of the king. A soothsayer had prophesied that the reign of Edward would be followed by one whose name began with ‘G’. So George,
duke of Clarence, was despatched. The name of the younger brother, Gloucester, obviously did not occur to him. It was said at the time that the queen, and her Woodville relations, had also been eager to destroy Clarence; his eloquence and fair looks posed a challenge to her young sons in the event of Edward’s death. Rumour was piled upon rumour; the murderous court was filled with shadows and suspicions. The path to glory for Edward IV had once been carved through the corpses of his enemies; now it mounted over the body of his brother. The king, according to the
Crowland Chronicle
, ‘performed the duties of his office with such a high hand, that he appeared to be dreaded by all his subjects, while he himself stood in fear of no one’.

Apart from consolidating his rule, and maintaining his royal profits, Edward spent a great deal of time in arranging as many advantageous marriages as possible for his immediate kin. His investments in wool and cloth, as a working merchant, were small in comparison with the investment in his family. In all he had three sons and seven daughters; two of them died in infancy, leaving two sons and six daughters. The merry-go-round began, with daughters being betrothed to the heirs of Scotland, France and Burgundy. The prince of Wales, Edward, was played as a bargaining chip with Brittany. The king wanted hard money in exchange; he did not wish to pay the dowries for his daughters, in particular, and so engaged in prolonged negotiation to avoid that necessity. In fact none of his children were married by the time of his death, for the principal reason that they were still too young. All his plans, intentions and schemes came to nothing. The thousands of words spent in speeches and diplomacy vanished into the air.

His younger brother was more secure than ever. Richard of Gloucester remained the paramount lord of northern England. The Percy family were supreme in Northumberland, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, but the rest of the north came under the direct control of Gloucester. Edward had no reason to doubt his loyalty, however, and he seemed by far the best choice to be named ‘Protector’ of England and of the king’s eldest son.

The moment came sooner than expected. In the spring of 1483 Edward IV became mysteriously and dangerously ill. It is reported that he caught cold on a fishing trip. Commynes says that he died
of ‘quaterre’ or apoplexy. The
Crowland Chronicle
states that he lay down ‘neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady’. There is a suggestion of death by poison. In truth the only malady may have been that of self-indulgence; he ate and drank copious amounts; he had grown fat and debauched. Only a very pious king could avoid such a fate. Edward IV expired in his fortieth year.

Edward died without debts, the first king to remain solvent for 200 years. It was, perhaps, his greatest achievement. He had made no great legislative or judicial advantages, but he had at least consolidated the role and power of royal government. He had learned to make it work after the intermittently weak reign of Henry VI. That was the sum of it. The fact that England emerged from his reign more prosperous than before has everything to do with the underlying strength and purposefulness of a growing nation.

Edward was not strong enough, in any case, to ensure that his eldest son would be safely crowned as his successor. The warden of Tattershall College in Lincolnshire wrote to the bishop of Winchester that ‘for now our sovereign lord the king is dead, whose soul Jesu take to his great mercy, we know not who shall be our lord nor shall have the rule about us’. Yet the transition appeared to have been immediate and graceful. Edward, prince of Wales, was acclaimed as Edward V.

The young heir apparent was at Ludlow, near the border of Wales, at the time of his father’s death; he was in the company of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, when he was summoned back to London by his mother. A council had been called in the capital, of which the principal member was Lord Hastings. Hastings, like Gloucester, was loyal to the Yorkist monarchy rather than to the Woodville family; when he learned that the queen had asked her brother to guard her son’s return to London with as large a force as he could assemble, he sensed the possibility of an unwelcome show of strength. He threatened to retire to Calais if the Woodvilles attempted to overawe the city, and at the same time he wrote to Gloucester with the troubling news.

Elizabeth Woodville then agreed to a compromise in which the young king would have an escort of no more than 2,000 men. Gloucester had been alerted to the possibility that the Woodvilles would control the king in more than name, however, and that they would supplant his role as the rightful Protector of the realm. He marched from his northern lands and joined his supporter, the duke of Buckingham, in Northampton at the end of April. This was just ten miles north of the place where the royal party had halted on their march to London; Stony Stratford was at the junction of Watling Street and the Northampton Road.

The two sides hailed each other with expressions of friendship. Rivers and his companions greeted the two dukes and entertained them at a house close to Northampton itself; they spent a convivial evening, but on the following morning Rivers was arrested and on charges of treason sent to a northern prison. Gloucester and Buckingham then rode out to Stony Stratford, and informed the young king that his uncle and others of his affinity had been engaged in a deep conspiracy against him. Edward objected, and protested that ‘he had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil’. But the force of a fourteen-year-old will was no match for that of Gloucester. Gloucester also informed the king that Rivers had played some part in the dead king’s debaucheries, thus fatally weakening him; this was in keeping with the strong moralism of his character. The young king remarked that he had full confidence in his mother, to which Buckingham replied that he should put no faith in women.

When the news of the arrest reached London the Woodville family and its supporters were in alarm. They tried to raise an army, but London was barren soil for them. So the queen took her other son and her daughters into the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. This was the second occasion when she had sought the protection of the holy place, but the circumstances were now infinitely more dangerous. Two families were vying for control; no council was strong enough, and no group of nobles powerful enough, to come between them. The dead king should have foreseen the consequences of his actions, in building up two centres of over-mighty subjects, but he had made no effort to forestall them. So now the queen sat down among the rushes strewn on the
floor of the sanctuary, surrounded by ‘much heaviness, rumble, haste and business, carriage and conveyaunce of stuffe into Sanctuarie, chests, coffers, packs, fardels, trusses, all on men’s backs, no man unoccupied, some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the nearest way . . .’.

Gloucester had taken immediate action to secure the person of the monarch in order to underline his authority in any struggle with the Woodvilles. He wrote to the council, and to the mayor of London, insisting that he had acted to preserve the life of the king and that he had no designs upon the crown. On 4 May he brought Edward V to London and, as a sign of his good faith, he insisted that all the lords and aldermen should swear an oath of fealty to their new monarch. Edward was taken first to Ely Place, but then was removed to the Tower of London as the appropriate place to prepare for his coronation.