The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (6 page)

A week later the army was camped outside Illora where there was bitter fighting. The citadel surrendered after four days and the entire population was again sent off to Granada. Two days later, on 11 June, Queen Isabella arrived at Illora. She was there to celebrate. There was a grand parade to greet her, with the Christian battalions drawn up in line along the valley below the captured city. The Queen, wearing a scarlet cloak and a broad-brimmed black hat over her auburn hair, passed down the ranks on a mule with a saddle blanket of gold-embroidered satin and a saddle of gilded silver. Fernando del Pulgar describes her as having ‘blue-green eyes, a gracious mien, and a lovely, merry face; most dignified in her movements and countenance; a woman of great intelligence and great wisdom’.21

It was a proud Queen who rode before her troops with the sun glinting on her trappings. The army dipped their standards and shouted in acclamation. Andrés Bernáldez, the chaplain of the Archbishop of Seville, an eyewitness, wrote:

The Queen was accompanied by her daughter the Infanta Isabella and a courtly train of damsels...The Infanta wore a skirt of fine velvet, over others of brocade, a scarlet mantilla in the Moorish fashion and a black hat trimmed with gold embroidery. The King rode forward at the head of his nobles to receive her. He was dressed in a crimson doublet and breeches of yellow satin...by his side, close girt, he wore a curved sword...mounted on a noble war-horse of bright chestnut colour.

The King kissed his wife and ten-year-old daughter. Bernáldez took satisfaction in writing of Edward, the English nobleman, accompanying the King: ‘Then there came up the English Count, after the King, to welcome the Queen and the Princess, very formally and in a striking manner, after everyone else.’ He was ‘armado en blanco a la guise [in full-bleached plate armour]’...and ‘on a chestnut horse with caparisons down to the ground’, which were ‘of azure silk with fringes of smooth white silk as wide as a hand’s breadth, the whole caparison was covered with gold stars and lined in purple. He wore over his armour a French surcoat of smooth black brocade and a white French hat with extravagant plumes which were made in so novel a way that everyone was impressed. He carried on his left arm a small round shield decorated with gold bends. He had with him five caparisoned horses with his pages on them [who] were all dressed in brocade and silk and there came with him certain of his gentlemen, all very well arrayed.’

Edward was obviously much recovered and quite well enough to undertake an entertaining display of horsemanship: ‘And thus he came to make reverence and give welcome to the Queen and the Princess, and afterwards he made reverence to the King. He then paraded for a while amusing them with his horsemanship, prancing and pirouetting with all the grandees and all the people looking at him. He impressed them all. And their Highnesses took great pleasure from all this.’ Perhaps that was when Edward knighted two of his men: ‘Sir Edward Wyngfeilde made Knight in Granada by Sir Edward Woodvill warringe on the infidels’, and also: ‘Sir...Cantelupe made knight in Granada with Sir Edward Wyngfielde’.22

After that the council of war reviewed the position. Matters looked good, so the army marched on to the next objective, Moclin, a citadel perched on an impossible crag.23 From its ramparts, the garrison and townsfolk gazed on the Christian army winding up the distant valley towards them. It would seem to be moving at a snail’s pace but there would be a grim inevitability about its progress, far, far below them.

First came the 
vanguardia
 with its flanking cavalry, next the mainguard, ten infantry battalions with cavalry wings guarding the flanks. (Martorell, writing 30 years earlier, says that battalions were divided into 
centuries
 and
decades
, i.e. companies of hundreds with sections of tens.) Then followed 6,000 pioneers, making the road for the heavy guns, ammunition and baggage wagons crawling along behind, pulled by their ox teams.24 An army with oxen doing the heavy haulage travelled around eight miles a day but where they had to make the road through the mountains – when Pulgar was watching – they managed just nine miles in 12 days.

The ‘flanking cavalry’ were 
genitors
 or 
jinetes
. After centuries of warfare against the Moors, the Spanish had developed light cavalry that were unique to the campaign. These 
genitors
 wore steel caps and a mail shirts, no other armour, and rode un-armoured horses; their weapons were javelins and swords. They were used for reconnaissance and patrolling, while in a pitched battle they were the ‘skirmishers’; they swarmed around the enemy, threw javelins at them, picked off stragglers but avoided fighting with anything bigger or stronger than themselves.

Moorish cavalry was similar in weight and function, and as the Spanish army marched they would have been trying to pick away at it.25 There would be an increasing amount of light cavalry skirmishing as the army marched deeper into Granada. The Spanish also had the traditional heavy cavalry of knights and men-at-arms, but these were kept for formal attack.

The Moors might have felt safe on their crag until they saw the siege cannons. These massive weapons were each four tons of iron, 12ft (3.66 metres) long and designed to fire stone balls. Newer, heavier cannon could throw iron balls up to 2,000 yards (1,830 metres) at the amazing rate of one per hour.

The guns were set up at 
punto de blanco
, or point-blank range, i.e. within a few hundred yards on a hill to the south.26 Stone or marble cannonballs around 14ins (36cm) in diameter and weighing 170lbs (77kg) were fired at the walls, which were breached. But the breaches were rebuilt and then re-breached and so forth for two nights and a day until, suddenly by lucky chance, a ball of wildfire – a ball of inflammable ingredients mixed with gunpowder which ‘scattered long trains of light in their passage through the air’– flashed through a window and into the magazine. There was a tremendous and stunning explosion that hurled the men on the battlements into the air and flattened the surrounding buildings.

The battered Moors were in profound shock. They had never dreamed of such devastation and immediately surrendered. So from the walls of Moclin the triumphant Christians could at last see all the rich plain about Granada and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada beyond. It must have seemed, after eight centuries of war, that victory was within their grasp. There was a clamour for a bold new plan: ignore the outlying citadels and head straight for Granada.

The council of war resisted the pressure to rush headlong to Granada. It was getting hot and the season was nearly over. They decided on just one more success and besieged Montefrio. It capitulated and the army marched back to Cordoba.

Also fighting in this campaign was the young Gonzalo de Cordova, who later became the ‘Great Captain’ in command of the Spanish in the Italian wars of the 1490s. He established the well-officered, well-disciplined Spanish infantry divisions, the ‘Tercos’, which were to dominate land warfare for the next 200 years. His experience came from these frontier wars where he was at the capture of Illora and led the scaling party at Montefrio. He and Edward would certainly have known each other.

The King and Queen – and presumably Edward – arrived back at Cordoba on 29 June and remained there until 17 July. This was when the monarchs could catch up with their administrative work, a role undertaken with their courts revolving around them. The court was formal and pious, but also buzzing with activity. The Inquisition had just been properly established in Spain but the Spanish ethnic cleansing of the sixteenth century was not yet a developed policy, so the atmosphere was relatively tolerant. The court was expansive and attracted all sorts of hopefuls and adventurers. One such was Christophoro Colon de Terra Rubra, a Genoese master mariner now known to history as Christopher Columbus. He was promoting his big project: to reach the Indies going west instead of east, which meant confirming that the world was round.

He arrived at the Spanish court in January 1485 and pestered and pushed for an audience with the Queen, but got nowhere. Sixteen months later he was still trying when Edward rode into Cordoba with his ‘three hundred splendid household troops’. The court and camp must have hummed with talk of the Conde de Escalas, friend of the new English king, of the blood royal of England and who had captained ships of war.

Here was a worthwhile target for a threadbare explorer-aspirant. For the two weeks that Edward waited for the campaign to start, killing time in a foreign city, he would be easy to approach and perhaps prepared to hear a story. He could look at Columbus’s map, would understand about going straight to the objective and appreciate the courage of the scheme. If he did hear and like Columbus’s plan, then he could offer access to King Henry of England.

But it was some time around then that Columbus finally got his meeting with the Spanish monarchs.27 We do not know which day Columbus had his audience. It may have been before the army marched and, if so, Edward could have been there, listening. The Queen considered Columbus’s proposal of going backwards to China and passed the project on to her confessor, Father Hernando de Talavera, who doubled as her chief of staff. He decided, in time-honoured fashion, that an expert committee should be appointed to investigate the proposal in detail.

Edward set off for home in July.28 He left at least one wounded officer, Rupert, behind in the Queen’s care and we also know that four of his soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Moors (of whom more in Chapter 10). As all of Edward’s recorded battles had been successful, presumably the four had been captured by Moorish light cavalry harassing the army on the march, or when straying from camp.

What is interesting is that one of the four was Petrus Alamanç of Bruges and the other three were his relations. It means that they were professional or mercenary soldiers and would expect to be paid three months in advance for an expedition such as this, so we may wonder how many of Edward’s company were mercenaries. However many it was, all would want to be paid, so the expedition would have cost some £700 in wages alone. Did Edward pay them himself as a contribution to the crusade or was he an early military enterpriser providing a company of foot soldiers to the Spanish crown on a commercial contract? Given the period and the fact that professional soldiers needed to be paid, the latter is certainly possible, if not probable.

Edward rode back to Portugal, which, undistracted by war, had been pushing on with her discoveries. That summer Diego Cão (Cam) arrived back from as far south as Walvis Bay and had also sailed up the Congo looking for the mythical Christian king Prester John. The King was about to commission Bartholomew Diaz to sail even further south, de Aeiro was setting off to explore Benin, and João do Estreito had been awarded a concession for ‘the discovery of the islands and continents of the West Atlantic’. The Portuguese seem to have known there was an undiscovered continent in the west but were being single-minded in their eastward push to India.

Battered and toothless from his crusading, Edward arrived in Lisbon for his visit to King João. He was particularly honoured at one banquet, ‘when washing hands after the meal, the King would not take the water sitting down but rose from the table’.29 (The significance of this may not be clear to us but it impressed everyone present.)

Around the court, the city and the quays Edward and his men would have heard and smelled the excitement of explorations. Perhaps he met Christopher Columbus’s brother, Bartholomew, who would visit London 18 months later and was then in Lisbon. Maybe Edward saw West African gold dust from El Mina (the mine) and felt England was missing out on the discoveries.

Sir Edward Brampton had taken refuge in Portugal after King Richard’s defeat the year before. Would he have avoided Edward? After all, their last encounter had been an armed engagement in the Solent when they were enemies. But Brampton was keen to gain King Henry’s favour (and was pardoned two years later). Bad blood was probably put behind them while Edward enjoyed the entertainments laid on for him by King João: bull fights, cane fights, plays, feasts and pageants. Edward and his men sailed for England some time around August 1486. He had certainly liked what he had seen in Lisbon, for as soon as he was home he proposed that one of his younger royal nieces should marry King João’s cousin and heir.

On the whole, it had been a fortunate expedition, Edward had fought the Moors,30 learned and seen much, perhaps fulfilled a vow. But who was he, this Conde de Escalas, friend of the new English King, of the Portuguese King, of Ferdinand and Isabella and of the blood royal of England?

He signed himself ‘Sir Edward Wydeville knight’ and he was not the Conde de Escalas or the Earl of Scales. His elder brother had been Earl Rivers and Baron Scales. There is no record of Edward claiming to be anything other than a knight, although the Spaniards did write about him as the Conde de Escalas. He had grown up under his brother’s wing and his brother used the silver scallop as his badge. It may be that he continued to use it as his fighting badge, for it had been a celebrated Woodville emblem for 20 years. Of course, the Spaniards were keen to emphasize the importance of all who joined them, and ‘Conde’ might have been a courtesy title, while the name ‘Escalas’ might be regarded as particularly appropriate as Edward had scaled the walls of Loja and that made him an 
escaladore
.

Whatever the reason, he was a Woodville, one of that family that had risen so rapidly to become so powerful under King Edward IV. Their meteoric rise had started in 1464 when Edward’s elder sister caught the King’s eye.

Edward was the youngest son of Sir Richard Woodville and his wife, Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Fortune had favoured the family in the spring of 1464 when King Edward IV visited their manor of Grafton in Northamptonshire.1 Tradition has the young King cantering through the park when he suddenly saw their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and was smitten. Legend has him planting an oak tree at the spot where he first saw her, later called the Queen’s Oak; it had a 25ft girth and was still just alive in the 1940s.