The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (31 page)

In the spring of 1489 Spain and England agreed the Treaty of Medina del Campo, which was about good relations. Coincidently they acted on Brittany; King Henry sent 6,000 soldiers and King Ferdinand 2,000. However, it was too little and too late. Twelve months later the troops were still there and King Henry was declaring he would not make peace or truce with France unless the Duchess be included. However, the duchy was doomed and the young Duchess at odds with de Rieux over whom she should marry. Not only that, but she had run out of money, sold her jewels and her country was sick of war. So when King Charles marched his army to Rennes and proposed marriage there was little she could do but accept. This ended the ‘Mad War’.

The wedding took place on 6 December 1491; the Duchess may not have enjoyed it. According to Voltaire, she had fallen in love with the handsome Louis, Duke d’Orléans, while he had been at her father’s court. But that day her bridegroom was Charles of France who had won her with rough wooing. He was not very prepossessing, being of ‘languid complexion, deformed person, and diminutive stature’, with ‘goggle eyes, an aquiline nose offensively large and a head disfigured by few and sparse hair’, or so he is described by Andrea Mantegna’s son in 1493.39 But he was King of France and victorious.

The Duchess Queen survived, and when King Charles died seven years later she married his successor, her first love, the handsome Louis d’Orléans. Duke Louis had fought against France at St Aubin, been imprisoned after the battle and was released by the intercession of his wife, King Charles’s younger sister. When he succeeded as King Louis XII, he promptly divorced his wife to marry Anne of Brittany, ostensibly for reasons of state but perhaps for love. Divorce was an accepted manoeuvre in medieval statecraft, always provided you were high in the Pope’s favour.

The defeat at St Aubin had effectively finished Breton independence and the marriage removed the last of the French feudal dukedoms. The integrity of France was achieved. However, the battle had other consequences that were more immediate. Four hundred and forty men sailed from the Isle of Wight and local tradition has just one boy returning, Diccon Cheke, who had sailed as Edward’s page and brought back the news of the ‘overwhelming catastrophe’.

Theoretically this was more than a fifth of the island’s fighting men.40 But there is a remarkable lack of comment in the island’s records for the time,41 which would indicate that the majority of the men were not local, rather that they were non-indigenous professional soldiers. Some or most had probably been part of Edward’s ‘household troops three hundred in number’, as they were designated in Spain, while others had just joined for pay and excitement. 
So that was the end of his company, some of which must have followed him in his adventures over the previous five years.

This was the final act for Edward but there was a little tidying up. There is an odd entry in the King’s accounts for 30 April 1489: ‘Item to a Scot with a beard that duelled [dwelled] with Sir Edward Wodeville, – l xvi.s. iiii.d.’ 42 This is nine months after Edward had been killed, and the bearded Scot has been paid for being in his household. What had the Scot done in the household and where had he been? Did the Scot escape the massacre and return to claim expenses of 66 shillings and four pence? Being recorded in the Close Rolls suggests the Scot had been paid to watch Edward.

The other entries on the page complete a list of payments made on behalf of the King by Sir Thomas Lovel. They amount to some £120 and are all of an intelligence flavour: ‘sent by a Brutain to Anthony Spynelle beyond the sea; to Wodelvose, that duelled with the King of the Romans; expenses to a Dane; to one that came from the king of Portingale’. It is clear that Henry wanted to know what Edward was doing once he had sailed to Brittany and was outside his control.

The next year, on the morning after the feast of St George, the herald reported that ‘at the mass of requiem there were offered the swords, helms and crests of the Earl of Northumberland and of Sir Edward Woodville’. Separately the Inquisitions Post Mortem dealt with five of his manors, three in the Isle of Wight and two in Hampshire.

One loose end can be tidied up about the men who had been taken prisoner in Spain. They were sent to Fez in Morocco, but one of them, Petrus, escaped after three years. He and his gaoler’s daughter fell in love and then escaped to Spain where they married. On 30 June 1490 King Ferdinand issued
cartas comendaticias
for ‘Petrus Alamanç of Bruges who came to Spain with Lord Scales, to fight in the Granada war, and having fallen prisoner was liberated through his friendship with his master’s daughter, whom he took to Castile, converted to Christianity, and married’. The letter tells of the ‘remarkable Count of Scales’ who ‘motivated by zeal of faith and charity...came to us, bringing with him numbers of men, horses and arms, prepared for war, so that he could fight bravely against the Moors: amongst which men was Petrus Alamanç, a native of the said city of Bruges...In this war the courage of the Count and his men was great...But Fortune, enemy of all favourable events, permitted the same Petrus...to be captured by the Moors.’ (See Appendix D for the full text of the letter.)

So Edward was not yet forgotten in Spain, or indeed Brittany. Such evidence as there is shows he was driven by faith and honour. He was a knight errant with his own supporting company of professional soldiers. The company would need pay. It would be surprising if there were not contracts between Edward and his troops, also between Edward and Duke Francis. In effect, he was probably an early military enterpriser, one of the type that became so important in the wars of the sixteenth century.

When Duke Francis sent his ambassadors to Edward they gave him ‘funds in silver’. This may well have been a down payment of wages, which would be fair, as soldiers needed paying and rulers had money and needed fighting men. Freelance mercenaries have been around for a long time, but in the late fifteenth century the contractual arrangements for hiring soldiers were becoming more structured, soldiers were becoming more professional, while new tactics and better cannon were changing the art of war. Castles were currently of little use and engineers had not yet developed the fortifications that would resist heavy artillery.

The Spanish campaign showed that Edward managed an efficient company of archers and foot soldiers. He commanded himself, as a tactical infantry officer, which was unconventional. It was new and very different to the traditionally knightly officer leading a wing of lances or a company of dismounted men-at-arms, or merely giving an order to the mass of infantry.

But he was also the last of the knights errant. The code of chivalry had run its course. The Middle Ages were over – humanism and printing saw to that. This was the start of the modern era and Edward saw its dawn. However, his real importance is political. It was his contribution to putting Henry Tudor on the throne of England that was critical; without the credibility that he and his soldiers brought to the Tudor cause, history might well be different.

The man who called himself ‘Sir Edward Wydevile kynghte’ is an extraordinary paradox: the last knight errant riding from battle to battle across Europe, a quintessentially medieval figure, and yet one who finds himself accidentally ushering in the post-medieval states of England, Spain and France.

The Woodvilles rose like meteors in the second half of the fifteenth century, but vanished by the start of the sixteenth. None of those five brothers left a son to carry on the name. Three died violent deaths, although that was quite usual in those times. But their name lives on in the records and – particularly – in King Richard’s propaganda.

Richard was the third and last earl, who died in 1491. He appeared at various functions and is not recorded as married, although a ‘Lady Rivers’ appeared at court in the late 1480s. By Woodville standards he was a nonentity and is buried in the abbey church of St James’s at Northampton.

Edward’s niece was Queen Elizabeth of York, whose gentleness was well noted. Sir Thomas More wrote an elegy for her and the Spanish envoy reported that she was ‘a very noble woman and much beloved’. She was tall for her time, with her mother’s fair complexion and long golden hair, and was probably the inspiration for the Queen in English packs of playing cards. She remembered her uncle Anthony, and 20 years after his execution gave money ‘to a man of Poynfreyt’ (Pumfret or Pontefract) because Anthony had lodged in his house ‘at the time of his death’.

She died at the age of 38, was the mother of Henry VIII and grandmother of Elizabeth I. Both were monarchs of strong character and considerable intellect, scholars, linguists and musicians who were masters of statecraft and unencumbered by too many moral scruples. One of her daughters, Margaret, married King James IV of Scotland, from whom the present royal family is descended. Edward’s other sisters also had children but they, like Elizabeth, became a part of their husbands’ families.

The Dowager Queen, Edward’s sister, had a remarkable life and spent her last years, out of trouble, in Bermondsey Abbey, dying in 1492. One of his other sisters, Catherine, appears in the margins of Edward’s life and embarked on her third marriage after Jasper Tudor died in 1495. She then married Sir Richard Wingfield, ten years her junior and the 11th of 12 sons from a distinguished Suffolk family, who was later elected to the Garter. (Perhaps he was the younger brother of the ‘Edward Wyngfield’ knighted in Spain.) She brought with her an annual jointure of £1,000 and the use of Kimbolton Castle. However, she died two years later and so did not enjoy her husband’s youth for long.

Thomas Gray, Marquis of Dorset, inherited Grafton. After his death, his son sold the place to his first cousin, Edward’s great-nephew, King Henry VIII, who added ‘Regis’ to the name. It was at Grafton that the papal legate had his last interview with Henry before the King made the Church in England independent of Rome.

Fame is fickle and when Tudor historians wrote their chronicles there were no Woodvilles to patronize them or ensure that their family was lauded. All plaudits were for the King, who was not much interested in other people’s contributions to the winning of his crown. Polydore Vergil ignores Edward where he might well, or should, have mentioned him. This was either because no one told him about Edward and his contribution or because he was erased from memory as irrelevant.

Henry and his historians did have a tendency to forget when it suited. They certainly forgot that the majority of the successful army was Scottish and French. That would not look good, with France and Scotland being England’s traditional enemies. Equally, if Edward was seen to have flouted the crown’s authority then he would not be a natural candidate for remembering. ‘What Tudor historians valued from the usurpation story was the critique of Richard III. What they did not want, because it was irrelevant, was material that was favourable to the Wydevilles.’ 1

The bill that King Richard had laid before parliament in 1484 had called the Woodvilles ‘insolent, vicious and of inordinate avarice’. It is hardly surprising that the popular movement to rehabilitate King Richard has seized on this and spent much time and effort posthumously blackening the family. The Woodvilles were the victims of Richard’s ‘virulent and puritanical propaganda campaign’ and so we only read of their supposed shortcomings. But Edward had shown no interest in his brother’s will and left an annuity of £50; this does not sound like a man of ‘inordinate avarice’.

As far as we know, the only child of the Woodville brothers was Anthony’s illegitimate daughter, Margaret, who married Sir Robert Poyntz, Anthony’s friend and lieutenant. They lived at Iron Acton in Gloucestershire in a manor house that still survives but was largely rebuilt by their son. Robert had risen against King Richard at the time of Buckingham’s rebellion. He then joined Henry Tudor and Edward in Brittany and was rewarded with a knighthood soon after Bosworth. King Henry certainly regarded Robert and Margaret Poyntz as friends, for he stayed with them when he came west, rather than four miles down the road with his uncle Jasper at Thornbury.

In 1501 Sir Robert was appointed guardian to Princess Catherine of Castile and Aragon, Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, when she arrived in England to marry Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII and Elizabeth. Her dowry included six elephants and one of them walked the ten miles from Iron Acton to Bristol with a little castle (‘Castile’) on its back. The others stayed in London, hence ‘The Elephant and Castle’.

Perhaps this appointment partially stemmed from Sir Robert’s relationship with Edward Woodville, the particular friend of Ferdinand and Isabella. Edward was the one they called their ‘faithful servant’ and ‘the remarkable Count of Scales’, ‘motivated by zeal of faith and charity’. So who better to be guardian to their daughter than his friend who was married to his niece?

Robert and Margaret Poyntz had four children. The eldest was Anthony, a naval commander; the next was John, a noted courtier and translator of Latin texts and probably one of the figures in the drawing of Henry’s court by Holbein; the third was Francis, a diplomat. They also had a daughter, Anne, who married Sir John Walsh and lived at Little Sodbury Manor where she was possibly the ‘Anne Walsh’ who employed William Tyndale between 1521 and 1523, when he started work on his great translation of the Bible; his translation of the New Testament was mainly from Erasmus’s edition of the Greek text, while his Old Testament was direct from the Hebrew, the first since St Jerome’s Vulgate 1,000 years before.2

There was a Thomas Poyntz who ran the ‘English house’ in Antwerp and lost both his wife and his business trying to save Tyndale from death by the imperial fires; he was a cousin. As history knows, Thomas was unsuccessful and Tyndale was burned at Vilvoorde in October 1536. His last words were, ‘Lord ope the King of Englands eyes.’