Burgundy naturally did not wish such an alliance to take place; he wanted Edward to join in a defensive compact with himself against France which would also boost trade between the duchy and England. Edward by now was inclined to favour Burgundy, but just then he was doing his best to negotiate the lifting of Burgundian restrictions on English imports and wished to play for time. Knowing that his marriage was a powerful bargaining counter, he had prevaricated for months, but of late, of course, there had been another, compelling reason for stalling. He knew, however, that his secret could not remain a secret for much longer.
During the summer of 1464 Edward’s envoy, Lord Wenlock, had visited Louis at Hesdin and been presented to a splendidly attired Bona, with whom he was very impressed. Louis offered Wenlock a huge reward if he could persuade Edward to agree to the marriage, and Warwick added his own pleas, having no desire for an alliance with Burgundy, who had shown no inclination to honour and reward him as Louis had. Warwick was, in truth, in thrall to Louis, who had flattered and beguiled him, calling him ‘cousin’ and promising to make him a sovereign prince with his own European duchy.
On 4 September, a great council of the magnates assembled at Reading. Warwick spent the next few days putting tremendous pressure on the King to conclude the marriage alliance with France, and Edward knew he could prevaricate no longer. On 14 September he dropped his bombshell in the council, announcing that he was in fact married and had been for four months. The magnates, stunned and horrified to learn the identity of their new queen, did not attempt to hide their disapproval, telling the King candidly ‘that she was not his match, however good and fair she might be, and he must know well that she was no wife for a prince such as himself’. Most peers regarded the Wydvilles as upstarts and viewed with distaste the prospect of their inevitable promotion.
The marriage caused not only scandal but political disruption. ‘Not only did he alienate the nobles,’ wrote Mancini, ‘but he offended most bitterly’ his mother and brothers, and Clarence ‘vented his wrath conspicuously by his bitter and public denunciation of Elizabeth’s obscure family’. Some nobles said they ‘would not stoop to show regal honour in accordance with her exalted rank’, and many members of the King’s household were ‘bitterly offended’ by his choice of bride. Die-hard Yorkists were angered that he had married a woman whose father, brother and husband had fought for Henry VI. Above all, the magnates, and Warwick in particular, were furious that Edward had taken such a
momentous step without consulting them, and were angry at having been presented with a
fait accompli
. Louis XI, on being informed of the marriage, expressed the hope that Warwick would mount a rebellion against Edward. In fact, the long-term effect of the marriage would be to create a fatal disunity among the Yorkists, which would have serious consequences for the dynasty.
Even before he learned of the King’s marriage, Warwick had been growing dissatisfied. He had power and enormous wealth, yet the King cramped his style by obstinately, and to an increasing degree, asserting his own will in matters of state. Warwick had been frustrated in his attempts to extend his landed interests into Wales, and had expended a great deal of time and energy on negotiations for the marriage with Bona of Savoy. Now he had been made to look a fool. What alienated him most was Edward’s failure to take him into his confidence.
As soon as he found out what Edward had done, Warwick wrote to several of his friends abroad. Only one letter survives, to King Louis, telling him that the Earl and the King were on bad terms, having almost certainly had some heated confrontation. But Louis soon heard that the rift had been patched over. However angry Warwick might have been, he still had hopes of concluding a treaty of friendship between Edward and Louis.
After Warwick had made his peace with Edward and their former amity was restored, at least on the surface, his position seemed unaltered. He was still the King’s chief counsellor and the most powerful man in the kingdom. But Edward’s marriage was symptomatic of his determination to act independently of Warwick and form his own policies. As the years passed and the Wydvilles rose to eminence, they could only be Warwick’s rivals, and his authority gradually declined, forcing him to pay lip service to policies he deplored. Wrote Warkworth: ‘The rift between them grew greater and greater.’ The chief reason for Warwick’s alienation was not so much the Wydville marriage but disagreement over foreign policy. He still had high personal hopes of King Louis, but Edward was unwavering in his determination to befriend Burgundy, and therefore Warwick’s ambitions were constantly thwarted.
For the moment, however, he swallowed his gall and pretended that all was as it had been. On Michaelmas Day Elizabeth Wydville was escorted into Reading Abbey by Clarence and Warwick and presented to the magnates and the people as their sovereign lady and queen. The assembly knelt and honoured her, and a week of celebrations followed.
The new queen was aware of what people thought of her and was careful to insist on the most elaborate ceremonial whenever she appeared in public to emphasise her royal status. Even her brother Anthony had to kneel when addressing her. Like her husband, she followed the courtly fashions set by Burgundy, yet her household was not so extravagantly wasteful as Margaret of Anjou’s and was better administered. Her jointure of 4000 marks a year was less than that allocated to Margaret, but she lived within her means. Edward gave her Greenwich Palace, which had formerly belonged to Margaret, and a London house called Ormond’s Inn in Knightrider Street, just beyond the city walls at Smithfield. In 1465, the King ordered that her predecessor’s arms be removed from Queen’s College. Cambridge, and replaced by his wife’s.
Elizabeth knew well how to manipulate her husband, and used her considerable influence over him to obtain favours and promotion for her family and friends, much to the disgust of the older nobility. Important posts in the Queen’s household were filled by her Wydville and Bourchier relatives. Mancini says ’she attracted to her party many strangers and introduced them to court, so that they alone should manage the private business of the Crown, give or sell offices, and finally rule the King himself. The Wydvilles, a grasping, rapacious clan, quickly became a power in the land, but they were also a liability. Their influence at court was soon immense, ‘to the exaltation of the Queen’, but also to ‘the displeasure of the whole realm’. Mancini says that the Wydvilles were ‘certainly detested by the nobles because they were advanced beyond those who excelled them in breeding and wisdom’. Above all, this new faction was actively hostile to the Nevilles, whose power over the King they resented. Warwick himself was determined never to play a subordinate role to the Wydvilles, while they naturally came in time to oppose the French alliance so desired by Warwick, and supported the King’s attempts to forge a friendship with Burgundy. This led inevitably to a rift between Edward and Warwick, whose friendship never recovered from the blow dealt it by the King’s ill-advised marriage. Wydville opposition on matters of foreign policy threatened Warwick’s personal ambitions, which were closely linked with the successful outcome of negotiations for a French alliance, and created dangerous tensions at court. The resurgence of rival factions there boded ill for the future of the House of York.
To the ‘secret displeasure’ of Warwick and other magnates, Edward advanced the Wydvilles by lucrative promotions and advantageous marriages. Overnight Lord Rivers found himself one of the most important men at court. His heir, Anthony, was already
provided for by virtue of his marriage to the heiress of the late Lord Scales, whose title Anthony now bore. The younger sons, Lionel and Edward, were made Bishop of Salisbury and Admiral of the Fleet respectively. The first of the Wydville marriage alliances was made in September 1464, when the Queen’s sister Margaret was betrothed to Thomas, Lord Maltravers, son and heir of the Earl of Arundel, and in January 1465, Elizabeth’s nineteen-year-old brother John made a ‘diabolical marriage’ with the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, ‘a slip of a girl’ of sixty-seven. Around February 1466, the King arranged for Katherine Wydville, the Queen’s sister, to marry the Lancastrian Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose wardship had been given to the Queen. Young Buckingham, still a minor, ‘scorned to wed’ the girl ‘on account of her humble origins’, but had no choice in the matter.
Other marriages of the Queen’s sisters followed. Anne married William, Viscount Bourchier, the King’s cousin; Eleanor married Lord Grey de Ruthin, whose father had recently been created Earl of Kent in place of the deceased Fauconberg; Mary married William, son and heir of Lord Herbert, the King bestowing upon the bridegroom the barony of Dunster, which Warwick himself had claimed as heir to the Montagues; Jacquetta married Lord Strange, and Martha married Sir John Bromley.
In the spring of 1466, Edward created his wife’s father Earl Rivers and made him Treasurer of England, thereby offending Warwick, whose uncle, Lord Mountjoy, had been dismissed from the post to make way for Rivers. Matters were made worse in October that year, when the Queen’s son, Thomas Grey, was married to Anne Holland, daughter of the Duke of Exeter by the King’s sister, Anne Plantagenet. This marriage infuriated Warwick more than any of the others, because the King had paid the Duchess of Exeter, 4000 marks to break a previous alliance between Anne and the son of Warwick’s brother, Northumberland. It seemed that the Queen had deliberately set out to slight Warwick.
Most nobles dared not risk the King’s displeasure by refusing to allow the Wydvilles to mate with their children; indeed, they were obliged to turn down all other offers. This meant that most of the eligible heirs to the peerage were removed from the marriage market, and this angered Warwick because he had two daughters as yet unspoken for. It may have been to mollify Warwick that the King promoted his brother George Neville to the archbishopric of York in September 1464.
One thing that the King could not bestow on the Wydvilles was popularity, which they never acquired. The mass advancement of
the Queen’s family drew adverse comment everywhere. Not only the nobles complained but also the common people, whose sense of fitness was outraged. Even Edward’s court jester dared to joke, in his presence, that ‘the Rivers run so high that it is impossible to get through them!’
With the King married, Warwick could no longer consolidate the proposed French alliance with a marriage treaty. But Louis did not let that prevent him from continuing to negotiate with Warwick to bring their two countries closer together. Edward had recently made friendly approaches to Burgundy and Brittany, with regard to forming alliances with them, and Louis had no intention of letting that happen. Warwick continued to put pressure on Edward to agree to what both he and Louis wanted, while Edward refused to commit himself.
The teeth of the Lancastrians might have been drawn, but there were still those who cherished hopes of a restoration. Late in 1464 the Earl of Ormonde went to Portugal to see if the King of Portugal, a descendant of John of Gaunt, would be interested in helping Henry VI. Soon Ormonde was writing to Queen Margaret at Bar to say that the King had told him he would be pleased to assist, but these proved to be empty words. Fortescue wrote back to the Earl that they were all ‘in great poverty, but yet the Queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so we beeth not in extreme necessity’. King René’s subjects in Bar constantly urged him to give more succour to his daughter, and ballads were written about her plight, but René was too impoverished himself to offer Margaret more than he had already assigned to her.
She still had friends in England, and had been gratified to hear from them of Warwick’s displeasure at King Edward’s marriage. At the same time, her contacts at the French court, less well informed, told her that war between Edward and Warwick was imminent. Delighted with this apparent turn of events, Margaret again appealed to Louis for aid to recover her husband’s kingdom. ‘Look how proudly she writes!’ commented Louis, amused at the imperious tone of her letter. But he would not help her; he even took Brézé from her, summoning him to do military service in the war against Burgundy. Margaret never saw Brézé again, for in 1465 he was killed at the Battle of Montlhery and she lost her finest champion.
On Whitsunday 1465, Elizabeth Wydville was crowned by Archbishop Bourchier in Westminster Abbey amidst lavish celebrations. Warwick was not present, having been sent on an embassy to Burgundy. Thanks to Edward’s procrastination and determination to befriend Philip, his hopes of a French alliance were
fading fast, and by the end of that year, England’s relations with France would be very strained indeed.
By July 1465, Henry VI had spent a year moving from safe house to safe house in the north, relying on the loyalty of Lancastrian partisans for shelter and protection from the Yorkist agents who were looking for him. In that month, he and the faithful Tunstall, who had been joined by Thomas Manning, formerly Keeper of the Signet Seal, were guests of Sir Richard Tempest at Waddington Hall in Lancashire, not far from the Yorkshire border. Tempest considered himself honoured to be able to shelter the man he regarded as his rightful sovereign, but his brother John, who lived nearby and often visited, was not at all sympathetic to the Lancastrian cause, and so it was decided that the King’s true identity should remain a secret. This would be easily accomplished, as John Tempest had never seen the King. But another guest in the house, a ‘black monk of Abingdon’, had, and he had no compunction about doing what he felt was his duty. He went to John Tempest’s house and told him that his brother’s guest was in fact Henry VI.
John was at first unsure as to what he should do. He had no wish to lead an armed raid on his brother’s house, yet as a loyal subject of Edward IV he could not let Henry slip through his fingers. At length, on 13 July, he took with him two neighbours, Thomas Talbot and his cousin John, and with a handful of men rode to Waddington Hall, where the family and their guests were at dinner. John challenged Henry VI to reveal his true identity, and made as if he would drag him from his seat, but Tunstall jumped up, unsheathed his sword, and sprang to Henry’s defence. A brief but violent struggle followed in which Tunstall broke John Tempest’s arm. Tunstall then grabbed Henry by the hand and slashed his way through John’s men-at-arms, aiming to escape from the house into nearby Clitherow Forest. But no sooner had he and the King reached the trees than John’s men had mounted their waiting horses and were riding them down. The King, Tunstall, Manning and others who had followed them ran on into the forest and downhill to the River Ribble, but at four o’clock that afternoon were all caught by their pursuers just as they were attempting to ford it near Bungerly Hippingstones.
*