CHAPTER EIGHT

This Sun of York

That the Yorkists won was down to the support of London, which was vastly richer than anywhere else in England, due to its role in the export of wool and other staples. In the nine months before Towton, the city provided thirteen thousand pounds for the Yorkist cause, enough to pay twenty-six archers for twenty days’ service.54

And now the city merchants had a king worthy of the name, the very opposite of the dull-witted Henry in every respect. Edward of March, also known as Edward of Rouen after his birthplace, had been born in Normandy but raised mostly in Ludlow. He had inherited his mother’s good looks and was ‘very tall … exceeding the stature of almost all others, of comely visage, pleasant in expression, broad chested.’ As well as being a giant—he stood at six feet, three inches—Edward was handsome, fair-haired, and blessed with charisma and natural affability, as well as a winning smile. He ‘was so genial in his greeting, that if he saw a newcomer bewildered at his appearance and royal magnificence, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand upon his shoulder.’55 He also had that knack of remembering the names of everyone under him, as well as something about them with which to make small talk.

Knowing how powerful the city of London had become, the new king took leading merchants away for team-bonding weekends, where they played sports in the morning and drank themselves senseless in the afternoon. These male-bonding sessions would involve risqué jokes, but also had a more sordid side, with women passed among them—for in sexual matters Edward was also the opposite of his predecessors, a compulsive womanizer with a string of illegitimate children.

Italian chronicler Dominic Mancini heard that Edward seduced women with money and promises, ‘pursued indiscriminately married and unmarried, noble and low-born,’ and supposedly tricked one highborn woman, Lady Eleanor Butler, into his bed by promising her marriage; this would cause problems later. Another Italian, Polydore Vergil, said Edward tried to rape one of Warwick’s relatives under his roof, although Mancini said he never used force, only lies, and then ‘as soon as he grew tired with the affair,’ he passed them onto other courtiers. According to French diplomat Philippe de Commynes, the king of England ‘thought nothing but upon women, and that more than reason would, and on hunting, and on the comfort of the person.’

Edward boasted he had three concubines, each with a special gift, ‘one the merriest, another the wisest, the third the holiest harlot in the realm, as one whom no man could get out of the church lightly to any place but it were his bed,’ according to Thomas More, writing in the reign of Edward’s grandson, the equally corpulent and sex-mad Henry VIII. The king’s favorite was Jane Shore, who was famously promiscuous and kindhearted.

In contrast to Henry’s dreary and pious court, Edward’s was like a teenage boy’s vision of being in a music video. Sitting on the marble throne, he was attended by four hundred men under the control of the Lord Chamberlain, while the Knights of the Body looked after his personal needs. Each day, he would sit in the King’s Chamber, where in the morning two thousand people ate at the king’s expense with servants on hand with water and thirteen minstrels playing quaint medieval music; Edward was a big fan of minstrels and even established a guild of minstrels after his own minstrel livery, the forerunner of a brand label, was usurped by ‘certain rude husbandmen and artificers.’ Edward also loved gold and had a toothpick made of it, and having it garnished with diamond, pearls, and rubies because it was believed the gemstones could be used to detect poison as they became moist with contact.

This was an era of outlandish fashions, with pointy shoes, ostentatious and vulgar rings, and enormous belt buckles, which young men thought made them look dangerous and sexy (The long pointed shoes of this era only became fashionable because one count of Anjou had them made because he had bunions, according to one theory.) The king himself was a great lover of fashion and in the first year of his reign had his keeper of the great wardrobe spend £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, at a time when the average annual wage of a laborer was six pounds. He even employed a man to jump on his bed after he had woken up to ensure it was wrinkle-free.

The king was a dashing young warrior, but he would eventually become disgustingly overweight, booze-addled, and worn out by relentless womanizing. The Crowland chronicler, an unknown monk living in the midlands, ‘marvelled that such a gross man so addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance, and passion could have such a wide memory that the names and circumstances of almost all men, scattered across the kingdom, were known to him, just as if they were daily within his sight.’ But while the new king could be jovial and even cultured—he admired and supported the arts—he also had a dark and violent side.

A new regime meant the spoils for the victors. Edward’s cousin Warwick, known to history as the ‘kingmaker’ because of his role in establishing the Yorkist regime, became the richest man beside the monarch. Edward’s uncle Fauconberg became Earl of Kent and Warwick’s brother John Neville was made Lord Montague and Earl of Northumberland, a former Percy title. Another brother, George Neville, was promoted to archbishop of York, the second highest position in the English church, celebrating with a feast in which six thousand guests ate for days, with one hundred oxen washed down with twenty-five thousand gallons of wine (about 150,000 bottles).

Edward’s closest friend William Hastings, who had fought alongside him at Mortimer’s Cross, was made chamberlain of the household and ‘gatekeeper to the king’s presence.’ He was also given the title ‘Lord Hastings of Hastings’ as well as Hastings Castle in Sussex, even though he had no actual connection with the place; nominative determinism, you might say. Hastings was described by Thomas More as an honorable and chivalrous man, but with a depraved private life. He was in charge of ‘organizing the royal amusements,’ which was something of a euphemism, and was considered a bad influence by Edward’s wife, for he and the king shared ‘compulsive tastes for wenching.’ Now ennobled, Hastings chose as his emblem the symbol of a man-tiger, a creature with the body of the big cat but with Hastings’s face—along with a comically giant penis.

Edward’s youngest brother Richard was made a Knight of the Bath, which literally involved him getting in a bath, as well as having his hair cut by a barber who ‘took the bath as his fee’ after Richard had been in it. After this, the young royal spent the night at church and was then presented to the king whereupon two knights fastened his spurs to his heels.56

As for the losers, some Lancastrians were still in exile, including the Duke of Exeter and Chief Justice Sir John Fortescue, the former now reduced to begging in Bruges. Others, such as Henry Stafford, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, were pardoned; but some twelve peers and one hundred knights and squires were declared outlaws.

Leading Lancastrian Henry Beaufort, the new Duke of Somerset, was captured in 1462, but Edward treated him well. Fifteenth-century London mayor William Gregory wrote that Somerset ‘lodged with the king in his own bed many nights, and sometimes rode a-hunting behind the king, the king having about him not passing six horse[men] at the most and yet three were the duke’s men.’57 There is nothing sexual implied by this, as people would often share beds as they were expensive and so precious. In fact, there was so little furniture at the time, even among royalty, that Richard III even took his bed on campaign with him, his money chest stored inside in a secret compartment. The word ‘chairman’ reflects the fact that furniture was rare enough that only the most senior person could use it.

Six months after Somerset’s capture, his lands were all returned, and some Yorkists were unhappy at how they were not rewarded and their enemies not punished. Somerset and Edward did have womanizing in common, but it wasn’t enough of a bond, for as Gregory wrote: ‘The king loved him well, but the Duke thought treason under fair cheer and words.’ It all went wrong when Edward took his new friend with him to Yorkshire in 1463, but along the way in Northampton, which the Lancastrian army had sacked in 1460, some locals tried to lynch ‘the false Duke and traitor,’ as they called him. Edward pacified the mob with a casket of wine while he snuck the Earl out of the city. After this, Somerset went back to the Lancastrians, fleeing to Wales in search of other rebels

Plots continued against the new monarch. John de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was arrested in February 1462, along with his eldest son Aubrey, for conspiracy to overthrow Edward with the help of the French, after letters between Sir Aubrey and Queen Margaret were found. Father and son were drawn on a hurdle from Westminster to Tower Hill, and hanged on a scaffold eight feet high to give the crowd a better view. Strangely, Edward then tried to woo Aubrey de Vere’s brother John, rather hoping that despite all these past disagreements he might become a loyal follower. And so, in 1465 at the coronation of the new queen, Lord Oxford officiated as Lord Great Chamberlain of England, which had been an ancient privilege of the de Vere family for centuries.

Meanwhile, Queen Margaret continued to keep the Lancastrian cause alive, although it looked increasingly pathetic. To start with, they had the sympathy of the new French king, the wily and devious Louis XI, who had come to the throne after his neurotic father Charles VII died in 1461 after starving himself to death for fear of poisoning. Louis, known as ‘the universal spider’ because of his devious manipulative character and network of spies, was a model for Machiavelli’s book The Prince.

While in Scotland, Margaret had at first sent Somerset as her messenger to the French, but when he arrived in Paris he rather unwisely boasted that he had slept with the queen of Scotland, Mary of Guelders. King Louis, a relentless schemer, sent him back to Margaret without any promises, and helped to spread stories of his boasts until they reached Queen Mary; she was so angry at Somerset’s absurd allegations that she had a lover that she tried to persuade her actual lover to murder him.

Edward took the threats seriously, and in a March 1462 letter to London aldermen warned that ‘the people, the name, the tongue, and the blood English’ would we wiped out by his ‘adversary Henry,’ moved ‘by the malicious and subtle suggestion and enticing of the said malicious woman Margaret, his wife.’ He warned she was going to lead a huge army with thousands of foreign soldiers from Spain, France, Scotland, Portugal, Denmark, and Italy who would invade England and presumably commit unspeakable acts. In fact, in October that year she did invade Northumberland but with just a few hundred men and had to flee again.

The reason was that Louis had lost interest in helping Margaret; their deal had featured a secret clause to hand over Calais to France, but without the cooperation of the Duke of Burgundy, whose land surrounded the port, this could come to nothing—so Louis gave up to concentrate on other plots. By the winter of 1463, Margaret was reduced to a pathetic band of followers based 150 miles east of Paris in the middle of nowhere, desperately going around trying to get support and money. They were so amateurish that an attempt to get help from the Portuguese went wrong because no one could remember the name of the king of Portugal.

And so Henry, Duke of Somerset, rode to Northumberland to meet Henry VI to start a new revolt at Hedgeley Moor on April 25, 1464, a battle which ended in disaster for the Lancastrians. Ralph Percy, a grandson of Hotspur, was killed by a force led by John Neville, third son of Salisbury, muttering the rather ambiguous last words ‘I have saved the bird in my bosom.’ Ralph was one of four sons to the third Earl killed in battle between 1460 and 1464, three in battle; Henry and Richard Percy were killed at Towton and another, Thomas, at Northampton.

Soon afterwards, at Hexham on May 15, John Neville led a force of three to four thousand men against a much larger Lancastrian army, many of whom drowned attempting to escape over a stretch of river called the Devil’s Water. Somerset was captured and beheaded, his title passing to his brother Edmund; he left a bastard son, who became the ancestor of the dukes of Beaufort, but with him dead, the Lancastrian cause was too.

In August 1464, the Percy family stronghold, Alnwick Castle, one of three fortresses still in Lancastrian hands after Towton, surrendered to Warwick; another castle, Dunstanburgh, had tried to hold out, but its defenders were soon taught an important lesson about how the new cannons made such fortresses outdated. Today it’s a ruin.

Afterward, Henry VI was smuggled back into England, hiding in Bamburgh Castle. He then traveled to another fortress, Bywell, before staying in a Cumbrian manor and then with some monks. Eventually King Henry was caught at Waddington Hall in Lancashire, but managed to escape with some servants before being captured again on July 13, 1465, by the River Ribble at the wonderfully named Bungerly Hippingstones. The deposed king spent the next five years as a prisoner in the Tower of London, where he was given five marks a week pocket money, as well as wine. He seemed relatively happy.

The last place to hold out, however, was Harlech Castle in Wales, which repulsed the Yorkists until Lord Herbert finally captured it in 1468, the captain being taken to London and beheaded, along with others. It was the longest siege in British history, and inspired the song ‘Men of Harlech’ (most famous for being sung by Welsh soldiers in the film Zulu).

However, there was trouble brewing at the Yorkist court. Prospero di Camulio, a Milanese visitor, said that anyone who reflected upon ‘the victors’ state of mind’ should ‘pray to God for the dead, and not less for the living.’ He predicted ‘grievances and recriminations will break out between King Edward and Warwick’ and ‘King Henry and the Queen will be victorious.’

The cause was love.

Hasty marriage seldom proveth well

In the spring of 1464, soon after the defeat of Somerset, King Edward was riding north to meet Scottish ambassadors when he stopped off in Buckingham and disappeared to go ‘hunting.’ In fact, he had gotten married in secret instead.

After the bloodshed, Edward had pardoned many Lancastrian lords, including one called Lord Rivers, who was given his lands back within a year, as was his eldest son Anthony, both even being allowed to join the king’s council. The family had fought with the former king, while Rivers’s daughter Elizabeth Woodville had lost her husband Sir John Gray in the fighting, leaving her impoverished—and one day Elizabeth took it upon herself to ambush the new king while he was out hunting to get her husband’s lands back.

Elizabeth Woodville was a beautiful schemer with long blonde hair and blue eyes, which were ‘heavy-lidded like those of a dragon;’58 as was common at the time, she shaved her hairline to make her forehead look bigger, which was considered more attractive. The king was enraptured, and by some romantic accounts tried to take her by force, only for her to stick a knife to her own throat59—fifteenth-century ideas of romance being somewhat different to modern ones, clearly. He backed down, and when his attempts to make her his mistress failed, he did the unthinkable, by marrying her in secret.

It was a remarkably idiotic move, and when Edward told the council that he was married there was at first laughter; no king had wed a commoner for four hundred years. That’s what Elizabeth’s father Earl Rivers, or Richard Woodville, had been born. (She was also the first English-born queen since 1066.)60

Then there was outrage. Marriage was for the purpose of alliances, not for love (or lust). Woodville was Lancastrian, already married and with two kids. Although Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Elizabeth’s mother, came from continental aristocracy—she had previously been married to the Duke of Bedford—her father, Lord Rivers ‘was generally regarded as an arrogant arriviste and blood-sucking parasite who lived shamelessly off his wife’s dowry.’61

In particular, this infuriated Warwick, who was in the process of negotiating a marriage with a French princess when he heard the news. Edward’s cousin was fourteen years older than the king and so influential that in 1464 a senior courtier told his master Louis XI in that characteristically crushing way the French like: ‘they tell me they have two rulers in England—Monsieur de Warwick and another, whose name I have forgotten.’ Warwick owned over one hundred manors in twenty-one counties and was also captain of Calais, warden of the Cinque Ports, warden of the Eastern Marches, and admiral of England. He was ‘arrogant even by fifteenth-century standards’ but also had the common touch and was popular, especially on the South Coast where he had gotten rid of pirates; that’s partly because he was a sort of pirate himself.

That the king did not inform his cousin before making such a decision was obviously insulting, and many believed that Woodville must have used some sort of witchcraft. The night before the May 1 wedding of Edward and Elizabeth was one of four Sabbaths in the witches’ year—the Germans called it Walpurgisnacht—and sorcerers apparently met under oak trees, as Edward and Elizabeth had first done, so it all sort of made sense. People felt that she had bewitched him, although the more obvious explanation is that Edward was a young male who was thinking with his heart, or another organ important to men his age.

Warwick had wanted him to marry Mary of Guelders, dowager queen of Scotland. Unfortunately, she was too old and too immoral, and by the time the plan was formulated, too dead. Edward also turned down the opportunity to marry twelve-year-old Lady Isabella of Castile; she instead went on to wed Ferdinand of Aragon, so uniting Spain. Isabella never forgave this apparently, and twenty years later her ambassador told the English representative that she ‘had turned her heart from England’ as a result. Philippe the Good, Duke of Burgundy, had also suggested to Edward a marriage to his niece, a daughter of the Duke of Bourbon who was apparently beautiful.

So, when the king announced the big news, Warwick had come expecting to be asked to go to St. Omer to meet Louis XI for the marriage conference; Warwick’s aim was to thwart Margaret of Anjou’s attempts to have her own son Edward betrothed to a French princess, and the king’s marriage was his prime diplomatic bargaining tool. Instead he’d just thrown it away.

Rivers and Warwick were also old enemies, dating from the time when the former had been in charge of the Calais garrison and refused further orders until they had been paid. At Calais, Warwick and Edward had also held Lord Rivers as a captive and mocked him, calling him ‘knave’s son.’ Cecily Neville also strongly objected to her son’s marriage, and with good reason, for the Woodvilles were seen as overmighty and unpopular. Elizabeth was, in the words of one historian, ‘calculating, ambitious, devious, greedy, ruthless, and arrogant.’62 She was so haughty she dined publicly in silence and during her three-hour meals all the ladies-in-waiting had to stay kneeling, including her mother and the king’s sister Margaret, although those two could at least rise after the first course. This in particular infuriated Edward’s two brothers.

The royal couple went on to have a happy or at least productive marriage, with ten children, although the womanizing continued, and he had at least five illegitimate offspring. Elizabeth, understandably, was hostile to a number of Edward’s cronies, in particular William Hastings, who she considered a bad influence on her husband. As Thomas More said, ‘women commonly not of malice but of nature, hate such as their husbands love’—especially when their husbands love to go ‘wenching’ with them.

In September 1464, Elizabeth was proclaimed queen and she was crowned the following May. Among those at the coronation were the new consort’s youngest sister, seven-year-old Catherine, and her ten-year-old fiancé Henry Stafford, heir to one of the leading dukedoms of Buckingham. The Woodvilles had won the right to marry Stafford to one of their numerous daughters.

Also that month, Elizabeth’s sister Margaret was married to the heir of the Earl of Arundel. By 1467, five more Woodville sisters had married peers, among them Mary to the Herbert family heir, which meant the Herberts could rely on Woodville support in their ongoing feuds with Warwick in south Wales. The Earl of Warwick was also jealous of the Woodvilles because his two daughters had trouble getting matches due to so many men marrying Woodville girls. Elizabeth had eleven living siblings in total, whom Edward felt obliged to help marry off: the most outrageous came in January 1465 when John Woodville, her twenty-year-old brother, was paired with the sixty-six-year-old Catherine Neville, the king’s aunt, a match known as ‘the diabolical marriage.’ Neville, ‘a slip of a girl almost four score years old,’ as a contemporary noted with some sarcasm, already had three dead husbands and several children older than their new stepfather, and even her grandson the Duke of Norfolk was a year older. She had been widowed at thirty and her second husband, Thomas Strangeways, had been the servant of her first.

They weren’t entirely a bad lot. Anthony Woodville, Elizabeth’s eldest brother, was a renaissance man who translated books into English. Anthony Woodville, also called Lord Scales, had a long military record, having fought against the Saracens in Portugal, had also been on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Rome, and was on good terms with the pope.

Scales was also a champion jouster, and took part in the biggest sporting event of Edward’s reign in June 1467 when the king arranged for him to fight the greatest swordsman in Christendom, Anthony, ‘the Grand Bastard of Burgundy’ (he was the illegitimate son of the Duke but the nickname was not an insult). Edward had purposely tried to bring jousting back to entertain the masses, the sport having rather gone out of fashion from its hugely violent heyday in the thirteenth century. Gravel and sand from the banks of the Thames was carted to Smithfield and a viewing platform built by carpenters; the Grand Bastard was given rides along the river in a barge with gold cloth, and slept in a gold-draped bed.

Before the event, Scales was coached by a famous old knight, Sir John Astley, who, in 1438, while jousting a rival, Pierre de Massy, had accidentally driven his sword through his head. (He wasn’t punished, although he had also spent four years in jail for another matter.) On day one, the Grand Bastard’s horse died after it rammed its head against Scales’s saddle, pinning the visitor to the ground, and afterward Scales had to prove he used no illegal equipment after there was suspicion. Scales and the Grand Bastard then discarded some armor and attacked each other with swords, after which they retired for the evening. The next day they fought with spears, then axes, but ‘the King beholding the casting spears right jeopardous and right perilous, said, in as much as it was but an act of pleasaunce, he would not have none such mischievous weapons used before him.’63 At one point, the king cried in a high voice ‘whoo!’ such was the excitement, and after the fighting with battle-axes had become so violent he had to intervene before one of them was killed; he also refused their request to fight on with daggers. It ended with their embraces, a save of face that left everyone happy, except it was then interrupted by the news that the Bastard’s father had died, and also the plague was back. The sports fans then left and spread it all over the country.

This event further alienated Warwick, who was in France meeting with Louis the Spider, Burgundy’s rival.

The worst Woodville outrage came following one of the numerous plots against the king. In June 1468, the authorities arrested a shoemaker, John Cornelius, a servant of a well-known Lancastrian. Cornelius was returning to Queen Margaret after allegedly delivering letters to supporters and was seized in London; he spent three days in the Tower where he was tortured by burning his feet ‘until he confessed many things’ (feet burning would be followed by stripping off the flesh using red-hot pincers, at which point most people would admit to anything). Among those he named was John Hawkins, a servant of Warwick’s friend Lord Wenlock, who was set up on the rack and accused one Sir Thomas Cook of being part of the plot.

Cook was a wealthy London merchant with a sumptuous house and Jacquetta, the queen’s mother, took a liking to a tapestry he owned. It was ‘wrought in most richest wise with gold of the whole story of the siege of Jerusalem’ and cost eight hundred pounds, a fortune equivalent to one million dollars today. She used an old law called ‘Queen’s Gold’ to demand that Cook sell the tapestry to her for far less than its value, but he refused. The Woodvilles then accused him of working for the Lancastrians, and sent retainers to sack his houses in London and the country. Rivers had Cook tried with ‘misprision of treason’ for not disclosing a loan he had made to Margaret’s agent many years before; they gave him a fine of eight thousand pounds and he was ruined.

There were other plots; Richard Steeres, a former servant of Exeter and member of the Skinners’ Company—one of London’s guilds—and ‘one of the cunningest players of the tennis in England,’ was caught with letters from Margaret. London alderman Sir John Plummer and sheriff Humphrey Haurford were also accused of plotting against the king, while the heirs to the Courtenay and Hungerford families were executed for treason in early 1469. There was a general atmosphere of paranoia.

And Warwick was upset by further matches orchestrated by the Woodville clan; the queen’s son Thomas Grey married the king’s niece Anne Holland, heiress of the Duke of Exeter, even though Warwick’s nephew had been offered the match. Edward alienated his cousin by removing from his brother Archbishop George Neville the ceremonial Great Seal held by archbishops of York, a public sign of disfavor. Warwick, away in Burgundy, was furious when he learned about it. It got to such a state in their relationship that the king ignored Warwick when he came to court with his French allies, and by January 1468, Warwick had returned to his northern estates and refused to attend the King’s Council being held at Coventry if Earl Rivers, Lord Scales, and Lord Herbert were there. And so the Kingmaker now decided to seize power, one way or the other.