The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (4 page)

The late fifteenth century was a time of brilliance, excitement, chaos, mystery and, of course, brutality. In this arena was a family who rose from obscurity to great power and then vanished, all within 30 years. They were the Woodvilles. The family made an important contribution to history but are now partly forgotten and much besmirched.

This book is mainly about the youngest, who signed himself ‘Sir Edward Wydevile kynghte’. I discovered him almost by accident. Early one spring my wife and I were in Spain admiring the Moorish palaces, fortifications and garden structures in Granada and Cordoba; the almond blossom was just out and there was a sense of sophistication about the places, which was in stark contrast to the grim architecture of the succeeding Catholic monarchs. Fascinated we moved on to look at some of the smaller Moorish citadels.

We inspected Loja, Illora and finished up at Moclin, where the ruined castle is perched high on a rocky pinnacle. It controls the only pass through precipitous mountains and dominates the approach from the north, then the frontier with Christian Spain. From the ramparts you can see miles down the approaching road, which winds up the valley towards you and then passes 500 dizzy feet below the castle’s western towers. On the southern side are the remnants of the medieval town and below its ramparts is the present village. Beyond is Granada itself, just visible, although much of it is hidden by one last foothill. In the distance beyond is the gleaming white Sierra Nevada.

This stronghold might seem impregnable but the Moors lost it in 1486, and so it was from these ramparts that Ferdinand and Isabella first saw Granada. We leaned on the parapet and imagined the Spanish monarchs with their courtiers and captains looking hungrily at the final prize, the great citadel in the distance. I wondered idly if an Englishman had been there with them.

We went on to visit Santa Fe, a village six miles south-west of Granada, in the 
vega
 or plain below the citadel. Originally built as the Christian siege camp and laid out in the disciplined format of all military camps, it was here, after the fall of Granada, that Christopher Columbus finally received royal approval for his voyage of discovery on 17 April 1492. I wondered if the Englishman had been there, watching the Spanish war machine, talking to Columbus and reporting back to King Henry VII?

A year later in a second-hand bookshop and quite by chance, I picked up a book called 
The Art of War in Spain
.1 It fell open at a page that told me that a young Englishman, whom the chroniclers called the ‘Conde de Escalas’, had fought for Spain in the ‘War of the Reconquista’. The young nobleman, ‘related to the blood royal of England’, had arrived with ‘300 splendid household troops all armed in the English way with longbow and battle-axe’. He was at the siege of Moclin and had particularly distinguished himself at the fall of Loja, a critical event in the campaign. Why was he there? What was he doing? What was happening? This book is the result of my investigation into the late fifteenth century, an investigation that has opened a box of delights.

Viewed from the fat of this century, it is hard to have a feeling for those times. While many of our ideals and instincts are similar to those of our fifteenth-century ancestors, there are some clear differences. They believed in an all-powerful God and lived in a near feudal society where the nobility and knightage subscribed to rules of the Code of Chivalry. The ‘Ordene de Chevalerie’ declared there were four principal commandments to which a newly made knight must be bound for his life. He must not consent to any false judgement. He must not be party to treason, which included killing his lord or sleeping with his lord’s wife. He must honour all women and be ready to aid them to the limit of his power. He must hear a mass every day and fast, whenever possible, every Friday.

Tales of romance, high ideals and derring-do, such as Malory’s 
Le Morte d’Arthur
, were the taste of the day and they transmuted into chivalric orders such as ‘The Garter’ or ‘Le Toison d’Or’ (the Golden Fleece of Burgundy). Knights errant embodying both the spirit of adventure and the religious quest became an important part of the poetic consciousness of society, while real life was supported by that unblinking faith which provided our ancestors with certainty and remarkable courage.2 However, new ideas were circulating and times were about to change.

The Conde de Escalas of Spain turned out to be Sir Edward Woodville of England, sometimes known as Lord Scales and a knight whose family, it seems, was one of the most unpopular in English history. King Richard III called them ‘insolent, vicious and of inordinate avarice’. Warwick the Kingmaker damned them as social climbers; others have described them as greedy, selfish and without public spirit.

Nevertheless they played an important part in fifteenth-century England and there is little evidence to show they were in fact any worse than their contemporaries; indeed some of them were rather better. Edward’s sister, Elizabeth, was King Edward IV’s beautiful queen and his brother was the erudite Anthony, Earl Rivers, who was, amongst other things, Caxton’s first patron and a champion of tournaments. Edward himself was deeply involved in the great events of his day and became one of Henry VII’s paladins before fighting his final battle.

The family has had a terrible press, but then none of them survived for long enough to worry. Skilful propaganda is no modern innovation and King Richard specialized in character assassination. He needed to damn the opposition, principally the Woodvilles, and he did that very effectively.

King Henry could have corrected matters but did not. In consequence Edward Woodville is ignored by Tudor historians. Polydore Vergil, Henry’s appointed historian, makes only a passing reference to him in exile in Brittany, then nothing for five years, nothing about him at the battles of Bosworth or Stoke. Other sources have Edward doing important things during these five years but Vergil, the principal narrative authority for the period, is silent.3

However, Vergil does report a heated argument over aid for Brittany and Edward’s outright disobedience. Twenty-two years after his death when Polydore was commissioned to write, Edward was simply not of interest.

King Henry had either forgotten Edward’s contribution or not forgiven his transgression. Was it just a lack of interest in Edward’s contribution to his achievement of the throne, or did Edward’s transgression still rankle, or were uncomfortable facts from the past just ignored? ’Twas ever thus!

The Woodvilles galloped through the closing years of the Middle Ages and into the dawn of the Renaissance and Modern History. Nowadays we can only glimpse this, making the story something of a scurry through the fog of the late fifteenth century, looking here and there for a friend.

Perhaps Edward was the last knight errant, for, in a sense, the Middle Ages died with him. But he was also one of those who ushered in the next period with its new ideas and dynamics. This was when England, France and Spain coalesced as nation states, politics was changing, the art of war was being re-written, voyages of exploration undertaken, the influence of Renaissance art was spreading out from Italy, books were printed and people were starting to think in new ways. Edward witnessed the demise of the Age of Chivalry and the dawn of modern Europe.

A work such as this book, which endeavours to capture the excitement and colour of the period, depends, in no small measure, on creating a feel for the period. Contemporary quotations help, and I have included them liberally.

However, there are vast areas of near obscurity, if not total darkness; these have teased me, taxed my narrative skills and led to occasional moments of delight in discovery. The illustrations, which are nearly all contemporary, seem to me to give a sense of the energy of the time and help the history.

There are several ways of spelling Edward’s surname and while ‘Woodville’ is probably the least correct, it is the spelling that most of us recognize and so I have used it.

He arrived in time for the spring campaign of 1486. Spring was the time when campaigns were launched against the Moors, and Edward Woodville rode in to Cordoba with ‘a beautiful train of household troops three hundred in number, armed after the fashion of their land with longbow and battle-axe’.2

The War of the Reconquista had been a testing ground for young warriors since the legendary battle of Covadonga that confirmed Christian independence in the northern mountains of Asturias. This victory by ‘Pelayo’, traditionally a Visigoth nobleman, was the first check to the Muslim expansion in Spain and so marks the start of the Reconquista, somewhere between ad 718 and 722.

Over the next 300 years or so, Moorish Spain flourished and grew into the glory of the Cordoban Caliphate, but then it dissolved into a series of petty states that were no more than ‘cats puffed up to look like lions’. By the second half of the eleventh century the Christians were already picking off these 
taifa
kingdoms, Toledo being captured in 1085.

There was a crucial Muslim defeat in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolsa. The defeat was so complete that the emir retreated to Fez which he started refortifying. As a masterpiece of bad timing, it was at this point that King John of England, searching for help against the barons, is reported to have sent an embassy to the emir offering in return, homage and conversion to the law of Mohammed, as well as pledging future support against the Spanish. The emir was unable to help and, moreover, disapproved of the offer.3 The victory of 1212 was followed by a series of successes, with Castile capturing Cordoba and Seville while Aragon took Valencia; the fighting swayed back and forth but the Moors were effectively confined to the kingdom of Granada.4

The Nasrids ruled Granada with moderate success until the fifteenth century when the politics became bewilderingly complicated. The emirate with a population of around 200,000 was torn by tribal differences, economically weak and its treasury further depleted by paying tribute to the kings of Castile. But it survived because of the weakness of its enemies. However, when Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile in 1469 and they subsequently succeeded to their separate thrones, the threat to Moorish Granada gained teeth. The demise of the emirate seemed probable, provided, of course, that there was no solid Muslim victory or a nasty upheaval in Christian Spain.

The War of the Reconquista began as a struggle for survival coupled with the natural inclination of mountain men to plunder the plains; it was later presented as a crusade. Now that its end seemed to be in sight, the campaign captured the imagination of Christian Europe and also offered prospects of pay and loot for the less devout. Swiss mercenaries were recruited while volunteers from France, England and other parts of Europe flocked to Spain. It was at this stage that Edward and his company arrived.

They had sailed with some merchants. The ships had called at Lisbon and then sailed down the coast to Seville where Edward’s arrival was reported to King Ferdinand in a letter dated 1 March 1486. Edward and his troop disembarked at Seville5 which was at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. It had been captured from the Moors in 1248, was one of Spain’s important cities and would be a good place to gather news of when and where the Christian army was assembling. The answer was Cordoba, 85 miles upriver, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were due on 28 April.

By March the rains have stopped in the Guadalquivir valley where Cordoba sits, the sun is bright, the orange trees heavy with fruit and, in the fifteenth century, the hills were covered with ilex interspersed with almond and apple blossom. Riding along those white tracks was Edward, all the way from England, with his banner of the silver scallop and his ‘beautiful train’.

Edward brought at least six chargers and also pack animals to carry trunks of clothes, combat armour and other essentials. Marching behind, past the rich valley farms with their fields of sugar cane, olive groves and grazing stock, came the 300 men of the company, who probably marched to music from the fife and drum. There would have been three captains and a few squires, among whom were ‘Edward Wyngfielde’, ‘Canteloupe’ and Rupert (the Queen’s household accounts refer to ‘Ruberte, Englishman, who came with the Count of Escalas’), a couple of trumpeters, ten peti-captains,6 100 archers, ‘all dexterous with the long bow and cloth yard arrow’,7 and 200 yeomen ‘of robust frame and prodigious strength, armed cap-a-pie’.

An infantry company with a pack-train and supply cart would cover around 20 miles a day. The soldiers marched wearing or carrying their steel helmets and dressed in ‘jacks’, which were stuffed leather jerkins that ‘withstood the blows of arrows and swords’, according to Mancini:

Their bows and arrows are thicker and longer than those used by other nations, just as their bodies are stronger than other peoples for they seem to have hands and arms of iron. The range of their bows is no less than that of our arbalests [crossbows]; there hangs by the side of each a sword no less long than ours but heavy and thick as well.8

When they arrived in Cordoba they found it full of the bustle of campaign preparation. It had been the capital of Moorish Spain at its most brilliant and even today its architecture reflects the civilized tastes of the period. In the centre of the city is the great sprawling mosque where the cool gloom is filled with serried ranks of marble columns supporting red and white chequered double horseshoe arches. Roman outer walls still encircle an inner ring of towering Moorish walls pierced by occasional horseshoe-headed gates decorated with Islamic patterns. At the west end is the Alcazar, the fortress palace with high crenulated walls, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella held court and where Edward was received.