North of Bruges, the flat, low-lying polders of Flanders disintegrate into one of Europe’s great deltas, a half-submerged, half-reclaimed world that gives the region its name, Zeeland. Here, where the Rhine, the Maas and the Scheldt disgorge into the North Sea, was Burgundy’s mercantile heart; the series of interlinked ports at Middelburg on the island of Walcheren a constant pulse of activity, shipping and receiving goods from the Baltic to Asia Minor, and beyond. Some hundred miles beyond Zeeland, the Dutch coastline dissolves again into the Frisian islands. Tapering east and north into Germany and Denmark, this beautiful, desolate archipelago – constantly shifting, forming and reforming – marked the limits of Burgundian territory. On 3 October 1470, Edward’s ship headed frantically towards the Frisian port of Texel. It wasn’t where he wanted to end up – the Walcheren, probably, was his original destination – but he had little choice. It wasn’t autumnal storms that had caused his small fleet to scatter, but the North Sea’s other perennial danger: pirates. And in this part of the world, the pirates tended to be Hanse, the trading league of northern European cities with whom Edward’s relations were at rock bottom.
In Burgundy the Hanse were seen rather differently. Among the Flemish cloth industry’s most important customers, they maintained a high-profile presence through their kontor or office in Bruges, while their ships overwintered in Middelburg. They also had other uses. Their privateers bolstered Flanders’ seaborne defences against raiders – most recently the earl of Warwick. In return, Charles the Bold did more than turn a blind eye to Hanse pirates operating out of Burgundian ports; he positively indulged them. When, in the winter of 1469, the notorious Hanse pirate Paul Beneke had captured the English cargo ship John of Newcastle, he towed it back to his base at the Zeeland port of Veere where, under licence from Charles, he sold off his stolen goods and converted the captured vessel into a warship.1 As far as the Hanse were concerned, anything English was fair game. So when a pack of Hanse privateers spotted Edward’s ships heading towards the Dutch coast, it started to hunt them down.
Trying to shake off their pursuers, Edward’s ragged flotilla split up. One group of ships, commanded by his brother Richard and brother-in-law Anthony Woodville, made for the Zeeland coast, where they reached the shelter of the Walcheren. Edward, with seven ships, peeled off and fled north. Reaching Texel, the largest of the Frisian islands, his captains used the shallow draft of their flat-bottomed boats to escape. Nosing into the shelter of the Marsdiep, the channel separating Texel from the Dutch mainland, they left the larger Hanse ships behind, unable to follow for fear of running aground.2
Some days later, Edward’s dishevelled band marched into the Dutch city of Alkmaar. There, they were warmly received by one of Charles the Bold’s pre-eminent courtiers, the governor of Holland and Zeeland, Louis of Gruuthuse. In his mid-forties, Gruuthuse, a veteran of the recent Anglo-Burgundian negotiations and a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, knew the familial and chivalric ties that bound Edward to Charles, and took his duties as host very seriously indeed. The fugitives’ journey south was transformed into something more convivial. At Leiden, Edward and his entourage refreshed themselves with four jugs of sweet, spiced hippocras and three pounds of sweetmeats, washed down by more rounds of Burgundy and Rhenish wine; reaching The Hague, they sank with relief into the luxury of Gruuthuse’s official residence, which he had placed at their disposal. Meanwhile, some two hundred miles south, Gruuthuse’s messengers arrived at Charles the Bold’s castle of Hesdin with news of Edward’s arrival.3
Charles had been at Hesdin since August, monitoring the build-up of French troops in the Franco-Burgundian borderlands along the Somme. The new regime in England, headed by his nemesis Warwick, raised the prospect of an Anglo-French coalition against Burgundy. Fighting the French was difficult enough; fighting both England and France at the same time was all but impossible. Making Charles’s nightmare that little bit worse was the knowledge that his Yorkist brother-in-law was on the doorstep, seeking help to recover his kingdom.
As reports flooded in of Warwick and Clarence’s rapid progress through southern England, London had prepared its defences with a smoothness born of long practice. The city’s oligarchs hardly needed reminding of Warwick’s preternatural ability to spark into life smouldering popular resentment against hated elites, nor the threat to London posed by such resentment. News flooded in of uprisings in Kent, from where Jack Cade’s insurgency had exploded twenty years previously. The city’s levies were mustered, fortifications were checked, guns mounted and ammunition stockpiled; round-the-clock patrols watched from battlements and ‘by water’, and marched through the city’s streets. Mindful of rumours that Warwick’s supporters within the city – foremost among them the combative Sir Geoffrey Gate, who earlier that year had gone to ground after narrowly escaping Tiptoft’s executions – were trying to co-ordinate a prison break, the authorities also kept a sharp eye on gaols and sanctuaries, especially Westminster, whose cramped lanes housed fugitives of all kinds.4
The attacks came towards the end of September. Kentish insurgents looted, sacked and torched London’s eastern and southern suburbs, their chief targets the city’s Flemish neighbourhoods, which were ‘spoiled without mercy’. London’s security, though, held firm. Then, on Monday 1 October, as the corporation’s official journal tersely minuted, ‘it was published by civic authority that Edward IV, king of England, had fled.’ Any further attempt to hold out on his behalf was pointless. As it tried to beat back the Kentish mob on the city’s outskirts, the best the city corporation could hope for was an orderly handover of power to Warwick and Clarence.5
Holed up in the Tower, her husband gone, Elizabeth Woodville quickly sized up the situation. Eight months pregnant with her third child, she, her mother Jacquetta and two small daughters made the three-mile journey across the city to Westminster, where she took refuge. Scared that any show of resistance on the part of Yorkist defenders would result in her and her family being dragged out of sanctuary, Elizabeth ordered them to surrender the Tower in return for guarantees regarding her personal security. Londoners appreciated the queen’s decisiveness, which helped prevent the city being turned into a battleground; for some, it may have called to mind Jacquetta’s decisive intervention with Margaret of Anjou a decade previously. They also noted the studied calm with which Elizabeth dealt with the shock of her husband’s deposition and the personal danger she faced. Her private reaction was rather different: accounts filtered out of her ‘pain’, ‘anguish’ and ‘weeping’.6
The following Sunday, Warwick and Clarence rode into London at the head of their troops. With an anxious city looking to them to restore order, they issued proclamations forbidding any acts of violence and stressing the inviolability of the ‘holy places of sanctuary’ – including, first and foremost, Westminster.
The same day, Henry VI was hastily removed from his cell in the Tower – where, as one chronicler noted drily, Warwick had put him ‘rather a long time before’ – and installed in the lavish apartments recently vacated by Elizabeth. Henry’s former chancellor, the cultured bishop of Winchester, William Waynflete, was sent in to explain developments to the fragile Lancastrian king, who he found bewildered, dirty and ‘not worshipfully arrayed’.7
Washed, brushed and changed into something more regal, Henry was escorted through London’s streets by the new chief representatives of his regime – Clarence, Warwick, his brother George Neville, and John de Vere, earl of Oxford, together with ‘other lords, knights, esquires and gentlemen’ – to his new lodgings at the bishop of London’s palace. There, in a swiftly arranged ceremony, all his prerogative rights as king were restored to him. Some days later, on 10 October, Henry processed, crowned, to St Paul’s. The date would have been lost on no one. Ten years before, to the day, Richard duke of York had stormed into Westminster and laid claim to the English crown. Now, the sovereignty of the house of Lancaster was being re-established – and with it, as was soon apparent, the insoluble problem that had led to its overthrow in the first place.
As a shuffling Henry was led the short distance to the west door of St Paul’s – Westminster, apparently, was too much of a stretch – his physical frailty and mental instability were palpable. In the intervening decade he had become, if anything, more detached, more unearthly. One Londoner followed the standard Lancastrian line, explaining away Henry’s ‘ghostliness’ as ‘saintliness’; another delicately summed up the problem, observing that he was ‘no earthly Caesar’. The Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain put it more bluntly. The king was ‘ordered like a crowned calf’, his uncomprehending gaze taken by his handlers as assent. ‘And’, Chastellain added, the real ‘governor and dictator of the realm’ was Warwick, who ‘did everything’.8
Lancastrian advisers had been trying to solve the problem that was Henry for the best part of two decades. Foremost among them was Sir John Fortescue, whose propagandist skills had made him a bee in the Yorkist bonnet during the past years and who had helped mastermind Margaret’s spectacular return from the political wilderness. During the crisis-ridden 1450s, as he witnessed first-hand Henry’s slide into mental incapacity, Fortescue had developed a blueprint for governmental reform that attempted to counteract the unpredictable hazards of personal monarchy. Now, with Henry once again perched on the throne, Fortescue saw the chance to implement his plan.
That autumn, the sixteen-year-old Lancastrian heir Edward sent a letter from France to Warwick, his new father-in-law. It contained a series of instructions for government which, the boy wrote, Warwick could ‘show and communicate’ to Henry VI – and which, if Warwick thought useful for the ‘common good’, he could put into action. While Edward of Lancaster might have signed the letter, it had been written by his teacher Fortescue, and it contained an assortment of his key prescriptions.
Fortescue’s concerns about the existing system were those that had run like a seam through the various Yorkist manifestos of the 1450s and early 1460s and, later, through those of Warwick and Clarence: the profligacy and favouritism of kings, and their propensity for being led astray by the whisperings of malign courtiers. But Fortescue’s proposed solution to the problems that had ultimately plunged the country into civil war was very much his own. It involved the appointment of a council of twenty-four ‘wise and impartial’ men, twelve ‘spiritual’ and twelve secular, whose responsibility would be the ‘good politic rule of the land’. These councillors would deal with all issues regarding ‘the rule of the realm’, from legal and mercantile questions to the processing of petitions for royal favour and the granting of lands and offices. Their impartiality was crucial, for it had to be remembered how the ‘old council’ comprised mostly great lords who looked out for themselves and their ‘own matters’ rather than the common good. This new council would be to the king’s great benefit – and, moreover, to the benefit of those around him, ‘whom’, Fortescue hardly needed to point out, ‘the people have sometimes slain for the miscounselling of their sovereign lord’.
Although Fortescue’s prescriptions went out of their way to stress that this council was simply an advisory body – it would ‘in no thing’ restrain the king’s power – there was no mistaking his vision. The king, he stressed, should take no major policy decisions, do ‘no great thing’ without first consulting this council, whose recommendations he should then follow.
Given that Warwick was now leading a rickety coalition of deeply conflicted interests, Fortescue perhaps thought that this kind of council, specifically designed to avoid faction and political rivalry, was an idea whose time had come. After all, Warwick had to show sceptics of all kinds that his government was a broad and non-partisan church. There were signs that he was anxious to do so: key posts went to a mixture of his own supporters (George Neville, naturally, got the chancellorship), Lancastrian servants and officers from Clarence’s own household.
Governing by consensus, though, went against Warwick’s restless energy and ambition, his constant hankering for a role – denied him by Edward – as the king’s chief executive officer. This, more or less, was the position he now took up. The deal struck at Angers made him both ‘regent’ and ‘governor’ on behalf of Henry VI and his heir. An unprecedented position of power, it combined the two roles that governing councils had historically been anxious to keep out of the hands of powerful nobles of the blood who claimed the title of protector: head of government and custodian, or tutela, of the king’s person. All of which was hardly inclined to convince sceptics that the restored regime would be anything other than a government run by and for the Nevilles. Those doubters, perhaps, had already started to include Clarence. For, if the duke had anticipated a role in running the kingdom, forming a duumvirate with Warwick, he was soon disappointed. It was to be the first of many such disappointments.9
One of Warwick’s first moves was to appoint John de Vere, earl of Oxford as constable of England. No sooner had Oxford been handed the post than, in an irony lost on no one, he convicted for treason his notorious predecessor as constable: John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, the man who had condemned Oxford’s own father and brother. Incongruously for this most remorseless of men, Tiptoft had been found hiding up a tree in Huntingdonshire disguised as a shepherd. Now, as one chronicler dispassionately put it, he ‘was judged by such law as he did to other men’. The fact that the new constable should never have been in charge of the process – whatever enormities Tiptoft had committed, they didn’t include treason – was neither here nor there. Everybody knew what was going on, and why, and what the outcome would be.
On 18 October Tiptoft was led to his death on Tower Hill through crowds gawping with appalled fascination at the man they knew as the ‘butcher of England’. An Italian priest at Tiptoft’s side, a black-habited Dominican, put it to him that his imminent execution was the result of his ‘unheard-of cruelties’, foremost among which was his execution of the earl of Desmond’s two young sons. If the priest’s suggestion was designed to offer Tiptoft an opportunity to confess his sins, the earl’s answer gave nothing away. Everything he had done, he replied impassively, was ‘for the State’.10
In sanctioning what was effectively a private act of revenge, perpetrated by one of his own brothers-in-law against another, Warwick underscored the seriousness of his commitment to the new order. He sent out writs for a new parliament, to be convened at Westminster on 26 November: an assembly whose purpose was formally to destroy the Yorkist claim to the throne, pronounce Edward a usurper and to restore prominent Lancastrians to political life and to their confiscated lands. Meanwhile, people were watching the actions of the new regime closely: from its backers, like Louis XI, to its enemies; from the exiled Lancastrians now preparing to return, to those who had benefited from the Yorkist regime and who feared they would be deprived of their gains; from smallholders to big financial players like London’s oligarchs, the wool merchants of Calais and the Medici, who had extended vast quantities of credit to Edward and who now, with his dethronement, despaired of making good on their loans. Warwick had his work cut out.
As Charles the Bold prepared his defences against the French onslaught that he feared was coming, one of his many concerns was the possibility of Warwick joining forces with Louis against him. An immediate anxiety was Calais, whose garrison, under the captaincy of Warwick’s associate Lord Wenlock – now showing his true political colours – was showing every sign of mobilizing. Eager to find common ground with the new regime in England, Charles felt he had a card to play.
Despite his familial ties with the house of York, Charles had never lost his instinctive Lancastrianism, and had continued to be in close and clandestine contact with several of Margaret of Anjou’s advisers.11 On 10 October, as Henry VI was being led round St Paul’s, Charles wrote an expansive letter to Wenlock at Calais, in which he pronounced himself overjoyed at the Lancastrian restoration: any friend and loyal subject of Henry’s, Charles stressed, was a friend of his. Two days later, amid reports that four thousand troops were being sent from England to bolster the Calais garrison, Charles dictated another, rather more insistent letter to Wenlock, adding a personally handwritten postscript for good measure. Invoking St George – who, he wrote, ‘knows me to be more English than the English’ – Charles insisted that all the treaties of friendship he had made with Edward had not in fact been made with one king or another in mind, but with the English crown, whichever head it happened to be resting on. As far as he was concerned, Charles added hopefully, those agreements were still in force. Then he came to the crunch: ‘the blood of Lancaster runs in my veins’. As the man to whom the Burgundian duke now entrusted delivery of his letter, an astute, sharp-eyed servant in his early twenties, pithily assessed, Charles was quite simply ‘scared’ of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.12
During the two years that he had served in the ducal household, Philippe de Commynes had grown close to Charles. Though self-confessedly ‘new to the sudden changes of this world’, Commynes was already experienced in high-level politics – though not in the kind of daunting mission on which Charles now sent him. What followed was a diplomatic baptism of fire for a man who would become one of the greatest political commentators of the age, and whose memoirs, infused with psychological insight and laced with slippery ambiguity, bear comparison with those of his younger Florentine contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli.13
As he rode towards the now aggressively anti-Burgundian Calais with an armed escort, Commynes encountered the first visible sign of trouble: a stream of Flemish locals fleeing the bands of armed Englishmen who now roamed the countryside around the Pale. Entering the enclave, he was struck by a new coolness towards him and his men. When he reached his lodgings, Commynes found pinned to the doors verses stating that Warwick and the French king Louis XI were an inseparable force. In case Commynes missed the point, the doors themselves had been daubed with white crosses: the badge of France. Commynes counted over a hundred of them.
Over dinner with Wenlock, Commynes remarked on the little golden ragged staff that Warwick’s deputy wore pinned to his hat. Wenlock, imperturbable, replied that when the news had arrived from England, everybody in Calais had immediately thrown away their Yorkist badges and replaced them with Warwick’s emblem. Apart from one Italian diplomat frightened out of his wits by the people ‘turning and shouting “Warwick”’, whom Wenlock had packed off to Bruges, everything had gone smoothly. The transformation, he told Commynes, had taken about fifteen minutes.
If Commynes was in any doubt about how quickly things could change, or the power of Warwick’s popularity in these parts, he had his answer. While Wenlock had over the years developed quite the reputation – he was, spat the Burgundian chronicler Chastellain, a ‘double and variable man’ who bent whichever way the wind blew – Commynes found him honest, realistic and plain-dealing. He was less sure about Wenlock’s men. Last time Commynes was in town, they had spoken glowingly of their king, Edward IV; now, they were violent in their hatred of him.14
Sticking to his brief, Commynes extracted an agreement from Wenlock that all existing Anglo-Burgundian treaties and alliances should remain in place, ‘except that we should insert Henry’s name instead of Edward’s’. And he remained bland in the face of relentless cross-questioning about the fate of the Yorkist king, and whether he was really alive. Edward, a poker-faced Commynes assured his hosts, ‘was dead’.
Nevertheless, as Charles the Bold continued his conciliatory approach – upbraiding Bruges’ officials for their over-hasty confiscation of English goods; issuing proclamations throughout Flanders stating that any move against English interests would be punished; and sending a Burgundian embassy to London – he was under no illusions about the corner in which he now found himself. Neither was Commynes. As he noted flatly, if Charles had to go to war with both England and France at the same time, ‘he would be destroyed’. The only hope for Charles, he wrote, was to ‘sweeten Monsieur de Warwick’ as far as he could, and to try to preserve commercial relations between the two countries: after all, conflict was incredibly bad for business, and the merchants of London and Calais wanted it no more than Charles did. Realistically, though, there was a sense of the inevitable being delayed. Wenlock would soon find out that Commynes had been lying about Edward’s death. Charles’s protestations of his Lancastrianism had bought himself time, that was all.15
As Commynes rode towards Calais, Charles dispatched two trusted servants to Edward and his group of refugees at The Hague; liaison officers who would stay with the Yorkist exiles and, at the same time, keep a close eye on their activities. At the start of November, Charles authorized a monthly pension for Edward of 500 ecus, backdated to 11 October. Not only, however, was the cash paid in arrears – by the time Edward had acknowledged the first instalment, scrawling an ‘Edward R’ at the bottom of the receipt, it was early December – it wasn’t an awful lot.16
Trying to keep all his options open, Charles was faced with a dizzying exercise in plate-spinning. In the account book that itemized his first payment to Edward was also listed the latest payment to the Lancastrian dukes of Somerset and Exeter, now serving in Charles’s army against the French. At the same time, his envoys were desperately trying to establish diplomatic relations with Warwick’s regime. Just as his father had done with the young Clarence and Richard ten years previously, Charles kept Edward at a distance from the Burgundian court, at Louis of Gruuthuse’s house in The Hague. Nor was there any mention of helping Edward regain his kingdom. Unsurprisingly, the modest pension Charles gave his brother-in-law suggested he was playing Edward’s royal status down. The money was, as the ducal treasurer stipulated in his accounts, solely for Edward to ‘maintain his estate’ – and nothing more.17
Having arrived in Holland with little more than the clothes on their backs, Edward and his men were, apart from Charles’s parsimonious allowance, almost entirely dependent on Gruuthuse’s generosity. Together with William Hastings and a small clutch of nobles and knights, there were about eighty exiles comprising an assortment of royal servants, like the signet clerk Nicholas Harpisfield and the duchy of Lancaster official Nicholas Leventhorpe, and hangers-on like the Bristol gentleman and alchemist Thomas Norton. In mid-October, they were bolstered by a group of Calais deserters – shooed on to The Hague as quickly as possible by Charles – and by Richard. Coming ashore some 150 miles to the south, Richard and Anthony Woodville had found a sympathetic welcome: in Middelburg, the city’s burghers had hosted a wine reception for them, and they had been loaned cash in the nearby port of Veere. Now, as they joined forces with Edward, his already slender resources were further stretched. Their meals consisted mostly of variations on rabbit – which, on the plus side, meant there were no temptations for Edward to resist.18
Adversity seemed to bring out the best in Edward, and his natural instinct for breaking through barriers of social rank to form intense bonds with the men around him. The crisis he faced seemed to absorb those obsessive drives that in quieter, more aimless times found release in his bingeing and womanizing. As Edward well knew, he could not risk his Burgundian exile becoming an established fact. It had happened to Margaret of Anjou’s court at Koeur: resourceless and isolated, it had become an irrelevance, until the impossible had happened. As the days and weeks went by, people would become resigned to the idea of Lancastrian rule in England; Edward’s own men would start to drift away. A few, in fact, had already deserted him, getting into a fight with some locals in a Bruges pub on their way to join Wenlock in Calais.
Whatever Charles the Bold thought, Edward had to start planning his return immediately, testing the visible fault-lines in the Lancastrian regime. As autumn deepened into winter, Edward’s agents were already at work, crossing into England, sounding out allegiances.
Late in November 1470, Parliament opened at Westminster with a sermon from George Neville, who had slipped smoothly back into the chancellorship. Without apparent irony, he took as his text a verse from Jeremiah, ‘Return, you backsliding children’, urging all those who had fallen into the error of backing Edward to make their peace with the house of Lancaster; the political door, apparently, remained open.19
For all that Warwick’s regime attempted to tread delicately through the thickets of competing interests in drawing up a new national settlement, the resulting compromises satisfied few. The most prominent case was Clarence. The previous summer in Angers, he had been confirmed in the Lancastrian line of succession. It was an agreement that put various noses out of joint – especially those of the Beaufort family, whose claims to the throne he had leapfrogged. With the Beauforts (among others) breathing down his neck, Clarence started to feel that the insecurity of his brother’s rule was small beer compared to the situation in which he now found himself.
Meanwhile, one subject that went conspicuously unmentioned in Parliament was the matter that was rapidly becoming Warwick’s biggest problem: the war against Charles the Bold that the French king was now pressurizing him to join. Louis XI’s agents – headed by the ubiquitous Monypenny – had arrived in London just as Parliament opened. They had been closely briefed, right down to the opening pleasantries. Warwick was to be referred to as Louis’ ‘best friend’, underscoring a sense of shared commitment and, now, obligation. Warwick, ‘for many reasons’, owed him.
Monypenny quickly cut to the chase. Louis was keen to invoke the secret deal at the heart of the Angers treaty: a ‘special relationship’ between England and France, focusing on a war dedicated to the total annihilation of the house of Burgundy. Louis’ agents laid out three options for a joint Anglo-French offensive: Warwick could choose whichever he liked. Louis was also happy to discuss how the conquered Burgundian lands would be partitioned between England and France. Above all, the French agents confirmed, Louis was now placing ‘everything’ in Warwick’s hands. Warwick should supply and pay for an English army, and confirm a starting date for the campaign, as soon as possible. The one thing that Louis ‘did not desire’ was any dithering on Warwick’s part.20
The previous summer, Warwick had been desperate enough to sign up to whatever Louis wanted. Now, it turned out, he had got a very bad deal. Aggression against Burgundy in the form of piracy – something Warwick had proved good at over the years – was one thing. A full-scale war, which needed unified political commitment from the nobility and Parliament, was of a different order of magnitude. The earl was facing an uphill struggle convincing even his allies of the viability of his regime. Those to whom he looked for credit – English merchants in London and Calais – categorically did not want a war with their biggest trading partner. Moreover, having taken Edward to task for his exorbitant tax demands, there was no way Warwick could approach Parliament for funds without risking significant public opprobrium. He didn’t even ask.
In London, below the flimsy veneer of business-as-usual, the mood was wary. The streets crackled with disorder; a night watch of three hundred armed men patrolled the city’s wards; the entrances to Westminster sanctuary, filled with Edward’s supporters, were kept under heavy guard. There, on 2 November, Elizabeth Woodville gave birth to a baby boy, an heir to Edward’s throne. Christened in Westminster Abbey, he was named after his absent father.
The city’s oligarchs, meanwhile, kept their thoughts to themselves and their heads down. The vengeful draper Sir Thomas Cook, now restored to favour, was on the prowl, going after those who he knew ‘bore favour unto King Edward’. In the Guildhall, the common council’s regular meetings were perfunctory, at least as far as the official minute-book was concerned: tellingly, little formal discussion was noted at all. Although it acknowledged the new regime, the city corporation’s true attitude lay in the extent of its loans – or lack of them. It had handed Warwick £1,000 towards the defence of Calais: safeguarding the country’s economic interests was, of course, a priority. That was more or less that, apart from £100 granted to Warwick himself, which in the circumstances was little more than pocket money. Whatever ordinary Londoners thought of the earl, those who ran the city kept their mouths, and their purses, shut.
In France, Louis quickly grew impatient. Not bothering to wait for Warwick, he unilaterally declared war on Burgundy.21 And that, as far as Charles the Bold and Edward were concerned, changed everything.
That December, French troops advanced rapidly into the Burgundian borderlands of Picardy, taking the Somme town of St Quentin and menacing Amiens. For Charles the Bold, the time for equivocation was over: mobilizing his forces, he embargoed all trade with Lancastrian England. On Christmas Day, Calais shut its gates and didn’t reopen them. Unable to do business, the Staple merchants started to haemorrhage money; away in London, the situation was no better, with ships stranded in port and warehouses stuffed with unsellable goods.22 For England’s businessmen, the outbreak of hostilities was catastrophic. For Edward, it was a godsend.
Now that he was facing an existential threat to his dominions, Charles finally had to be decisive. The best way to alleviate pressure on Burgundy was for Edward to regain his crown; Louis XI hardly possessed the resources to fight both England and Burgundy at once. Doubtless encouraged by some persuasive words from his wife, Edward’s sister Margaret, Charles decided the time had come to rediscover his Yorkist side and embrace his English brother-in-law.
On Christmas Day, Edward, Richard and Louis de Gruuthuse, accompanied by a small group of Edward’s closest followers, started on the two-hundred-mile journey south from The Hague to the town of Aire, south of Calais, where Edward and Charles were due to meet face-to-face for the first time. Arriving first, on 1 January 1471, the Yorkists were met by a ducal envoy bearing the news for which they had been hoping for months: Charles had signed off a massive loan of £20,000 to Edward, now unequivocally styled ‘King of England’. As the duke’s treasurer noted in his account book, the sum was explicitly intended to help Edward and his brother Richard ‘to return to the kingdom of England’.23
At a stroke, Edward’s prospects had been transformed. No longer the unwanted poor relation whose presence had so alarmed and embarrassed Charles, his aims and those of his brother-in-law now cohered exactly: to remove the Lancastrian regime from power as fast as possible. Edward had come in from the cold.
When Charles arrived the following day, the two men embraced warmly. Among the cluster of ducal attendants was Philippe de Commynes, who – not a man to lavish unnecessary praise – was transfixed by Edward’s sheer magnetism. Seeing the English king in person for the first time, he seemed unable to tear his gaze away: Edward was, he recalled, ‘the most beautiful prince my eyes ever beheld’. In fact, he added, he had never seen a ‘more handsome prince’ than Edward was at that moment, ‘when my lord of Warwick forced him to flee from England’.24 Crises, Commynes suggested, became him.
Edward had barely started talking before Charles cut in, offering whatever finance and military backing he needed. Charles’s wholehearted identification with Edward’s cause had the zeal of a convert; it even extended to tackling his own split loyalties once and for all. In the following days, the pair headed south towards the front line with France and the town of St Pol. Awaiting them there were the two exiled Lancastrian noblemen whom Charles had been sheltering: Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and Henry Holland, duke of Exeter. Rather than dismissing his former allies out of hand, Charles – careful to keep his new Yorkist friends well apart from their bitter enemies – settled down to chat with them.
Just possibly, Charles surmised, there was the chance of outdoing Louis’ efforts at Angers the previous year and brokering an agreement between Edward and the Beaufort family. After all, if Somerset detested Edward, he also hated Warwick – a hatred that the new settlement in England, the Beauforts cut out of the Lancastrian succession in favour of Clarence and his heirs, had done little to dispel. But at St Pol, the impossibility of any reconciliation quickly became apparent, the Lancastrians emphatically restating their opposition to Edward and their loyalty to Henry VI.
As negotiations with the two Lancastrian nobles disintegrated, Charles moved to plan B. He told the pair that if they wouldn’t come to terms with Edward, they would have to leave Flanders, their intermittent place of refuge for the previous six years. That Charles and Edward were prepared to risk the two lords going back to England spoke volumes. Around that time, another returning Lancastrian exile, the earl of Ormond, received a letter from his son urging him to set aside the implacable ‘loathing and hatred’ he had for Warwick and Clarence. If Somerset and Exeter went back to England in anything like the same frame of mind, Edward and Charles probably reasoned, their disruptive presence at Henry VI’s court might prove a distinct asset to Edward’s cause.25
Following the Lancastrians’ departure, Edward and Charles talked through the night, stressing their common bonds of brotherhood and chivalry. As far as his own plans were concerned, Edward said, things looked good: he was receiving excellent intelligence from reliable sources in England.26 Speed, however, was vital. It was crucial to return before Margaret of Anjou and her son arrived in England – that December, storms in the Channel had already forced them to abandon one crossing – and the Lancastrian regime, now some three months old, started to become a fact on the ground.
While Edward was constitutionally inclined to play up his own chances, he had reasons to be bullish. From their places of hiding, Edward’s supporters in London had managed to evade Warwick’s surveillance and establish contact with the exiles ‘by the most covert means that they could’, with updates on the political situation. Discouraging news – the general hostility of the commons – was offset by the more positive demeanour of the city’s elites, who, whatever they thought of Edward, thought worse of Warwick.27
Meanwhile, Edward’s men were probing loyalties elsewhere in England, with reasonably encouraging results. Among them was the chamber servant Nicholas Leventhorpe, sent clandestinely into his native northeast to make contact with Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. While Percy’s instincts were Lancastrian, Edward had restored him to his earldom the previous year: a decision that at the time looked a disastrous misjudgement but which now, with Percy’s great rivals the Nevilles in power, might pay dividends. Leventhorpe had made landfall easily enough, evading local security, but his return journey had been problematic. With his ship impounded by suspicious port authorities and the northeastern ports on high alert, he had journeyed 150 miles north, across the Scottish border to Dundee. There, after five days trying and failing to put to sea in an inadequately rigged Dutch fishing boat, he forked out £4 on a fast and much more dextrous caravel that could go ‘high in the wind’. Finally making it back to Middelburg, Leventhorpe brought positive news and, with him, evidence of Yorkist support in the region: a servant of the formidable Yorkshire knight Sir Ralph Ashton.28
All such intelligence, however, remained speculative. Until Edward set foot in England, he had no way of knowing whether anybody planned to keep their promises. And to make that happen, he had his work cut out to raise loans, mercenaries, materiel and supplies, and the ships that would transport them across the North Sea. On 10 January, he and Charles parted. Charles returned to the front, to oversee his defensive campaign against the French. Edward headed northeast, for the Low Countries’ political and financial heart: Bruges.29
After Paris and Ghent, Bruges was the third largest city in northern Europe and one of its great entrepôts, ringed and interwoven by canals, the arteries that connected it to its North Sea outport of Damme and from there to the world. At its core lay the vast marketplace, dominated by its belfry and cloth hall and a giant crane in constant motion, loading and unloading goods from the boats on to the Spiegelrei, children slogging round its twin treadwheels. Running north from the square, the heaving thoroughfare of Vlamingstraat opened out into a smaller place that took its name from a large, foursquare building that stood in one corner. One of many multi-purpose hofs that provided lodgings, kitchens, financial services, warehouses, places of business and entertainment – or ‘cabaret’, as one such hostel described itself – the Beurse was named after its owners, the family of van der Beurse, whose coat-of-arms, three purses, was carved in stone above the door. Over time, the building’s name had become synonymous with the business carried on inside it: in the years and centuries to come, the Bourse would lend its name to financial exchanges the world over. On the same square were the Genoese and Florentine consulates and, in the surrounding streets, the other ‘nations’ or resident merchant communities: the Hanse kontor, the extravagant Medici residence of Hof Bladelin and, east of the Crane, the ‘English Street’, with its own dedicated weigh house. An impecunious English king, trying to raise money and resources to reinvade his own country, could hardly have found himself in a better place.30
Along with the other cities and towns strung along the Flanders coastline, though, Bruges had been on edge for months. Anxieties were heightened by intermittent reports of Warwick’s menacing fleet, commanded by his illegitimate cousin Thomas ‘the Bastard’ of Fauconberg, which attacked and looted ships irrespective of nationality. On 13 January, Edward and his men rode into a city on constant, agitated alert. Processions of clergy, praying for the safety of Bruges and Flanders, paced through the streets, intersecting with round-the-clock patrols. There, Edward was welcomed by the man who had been a reassuring presence at his side since arriving in the Low Countries three months previously, Louis of Gruuthuse.31
In the shadow of the Church of Our Lady, its bell-tower spiking the sky, Gruuthuse’s Bruges townhouse would be Edward’s base in the weeks to come. Gathered intimately round a central courtyard, the elegant brickwork and mullioned windows of its buildings exuded an urbane sophistication; inside, its tapestry-lined galleries were saturated with the culture of the Burgundian dukes. A constant refrain – painted on walls and ceilings, worked into the great ornamented fireplaces – was Gruuthuse’s motto, ‘plus est en vous’: nobility and virtue, he believed, were to be found within.
In the exquisite comfort of Gruuthuse’s home, Edward found much that was familiar. In recent years, his embrace of all things Burgundian had extended to investing heavily in its culture. While Edward yielded nothing to Charles the Bold in the small fortune he had spent on Burgundian tapestries – some £2,500 in 1467 alone on several sets of arras, including a nine-piece History of Alexander – there was nothing to indicate he had ever before come into contact with a library quite like Gruuthuse’s: a collection second only to that of the dukes of Burgundy and which would come to define him as one of the great bibliophiles of the age.32
Produced by the finest studios in Flanders, these massive, luxurious manuscripts were works of art in their own right. With vividly ornamented initials, liberally scattered with Gruuthuse’s arms and motto, their borders were a profusion of illuminated foliage and wildlife. Exquisite page-length illustrations depicted scenes from religion, history and chivalric romance: of knights wandering the Middle East, of loyalty and love, of glorious deaths in great battles. One manuscript, a History of Jason and the Golden Fleece by the Burgundian cleric and writer Raoul Lefèvre, recounted the tale of the Greek hero who journeyed through foreign seas and hostile lands, seeking the fleece whose possession would allow him to claim the throne that was his birthright. For the Burgundian dukes, this myth was the greatest of quests, one embodied by their own chivalric order, the Golden Fleece. As a member of the Order himself, it was no surprise that the manuscript was one of the finest in Gruuthuse’s collection; neither would it have been a surprise if he had shown the book off to Edward, an inspiring example of what the chivalric brotherhood could achieve.33
As Gruuthuse himself drummed up support for Edward among his fellow Burgundians, the Yorkists wrote letters, petitioned, bargained, raised loans and organized. Anthony Woodville was soon deep in talks with the civic authorities about fitting out a fleet. Edward managed to convince the Hanse merchants to loan him a number of ships: a feat of persuasion that owed as much to the Hanse’s loathing of Warwick as to Edward’s capacious promises, which included the full reinstatement of their trading privileges in England. Funds began to roll in from towns and cities across the Low Countries, including the ports of Middelburg and Veere, in exchange for similar guarantees. Money also came in from those who, having already invested heavily in Edward, had every interest in seeing him back on the throne.34
Richard, meanwhile, rode some sixty miles south, to the city of Lille. There, on 12 February, he joined his sister Margaret, bringing her news of the developing plans. Although, as duchess of Burgundy, Margaret had officially kept her distance from the exiles in the months following their arrival, she had maintained constant secret contact. Now, as Edward prepared to invade England, his sister’s dual Anglo-Burgundian identity made her an unparalleled asset: indeed, as he headed to Bruges that January following his rapprochement with Charles, his own first stop en route had been Margaret’s household at Lille.
It wasn’t simply Margaret’s fundraising abilities that made her invaluable to Edward’s cause – though her energetic lobbying soon bore fruit in a substantial loan from a syndicate of Dutch towns. For Margaret, Warwick’s regime threatened the destruction of both her blood family and, in Burgundy, her adoptive one. Reuniting her three brothers was now her great priority, and she made ‘great and diligent’ efforts to prise the errant Clarence away from Warwick and the Lancastrians and back to the family, sending a stream of agents into England. Her efforts dovetailed with those of William Hastings, who was masterminding Edward’s efforts to reach out to Clarence and other disaffected elements within Warwick’s administration.
Through all the upheavals of recent years, Warwick and Clarence had never expressed any beef with Hastings, who, despite being Edward’s closest friend, had achieved the remarkable feat of never appearing on the rebel lords’ lists of corrupt advisers. It was true that Warwick and Hastings, brothers-in-law, were close, and the pair had overlapping interests; neither had Hastings benefited from a close relationship with Queen Elizabeth’s family. Besides which, Hastings’ reputation as a likeable, honest and plain-dealing man went before him; his voice seemed to carry with it a candour and trustworthiness lacking in others.
That February, then, Richard’s journey to Lille was not – or not only – about a reunion with a sister whom he had not seen for almost three years; it was about making sure Margaret’s activities were closely aligned with those of Edward and his people. As they all knew, Clarence was ready to be turned.35
In the first weeks of January 1471, Warwick had his hands full with the war he had promised Louis XI. Overseeing the fitting-out of a fleet in the Cinque ports, and co-ordinating the first strikes into Burgundian territory by the Calais garrison – ‘I will come and serve you as soon as I possibly can against this blasted Burgundian’, he assured Louis – he was out of London much of the time. The earl’s multitasking was beginning to take on a frenetic air. Unable to ask Parliament for money, and with credit from a sceptical mercantile community scarce, he was unable to commit himself in the way that Louis wanted; moreover, with rumours of Edward’s planned invasion gathering strength, he was also mustering troops for home service. In a telling sign of his inability to rely on wider noble loyalties, Warwick entrusted the task of mobilizing defence forces to a mere seven lords, including himself, across the entire country. In his absence, the regime’s nominal figurehead in Westminster and London was Clarence. But by this time, Clarence was feeling distinctly like a fish out of water.36
As Lancastrian exiles trickled back into England in anticipation of the return of Margaret of Anjou and her son, a nagging sense of his own vulnerability had begun to settle in Clarence’s mind. Men intimately associated with the house of Lancaster, like the recently returned duke of Somerset, barely bothered to conceal their loathing. People were, Clarence felt, disrespecting him, looking down on him, treating him with ‘great suspicion and disdain’, even ‘hatred’.
This disrespect took on a distinctly practical form. The earl of Ormond’s son, in begging his father not to hate Warwick too much, pointed out that Warwick had gone out of his way to restore property to those Lancastrians whose lands had been annexed by Edward back in 1461 and redistributed it to his own supporters. Foremost among those beneficiaries, of course, was Clarence, whose vast estates had been carved out of a variety of confiscated lands. For diehard Lancastrians, a political map of England had no Clarence in it at all. If that map were now to be restored, the physical foundation of Clarence’s power would disintegrate completely.
There were some safeguards for Clarence against predatory Lancastrian rivals. The Angers agreement stipulated that, unless Clarence received compensation in full for any lands restored to Lancastrian claimants, he could keep them – which, given that the new government had nothing with which to compensate him, seemed reasonable security. But from the moment Henry VI had been restored to the throne, the pressure on Clarence’s interests had started. It had come from a predictable source: the Beaufort family. Despite the act of Parliament confirming Clarence’s possession of the earldom of Richmond, its previous incumbent Henry Tudor – or, more to the point, his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, a diminutive twenty-seven-year-old who doted on her only son – wanted Richmond back.
Tudor’s Lancastrian credentials were impeccable – if, that was, you discounted the flaw of bastardy that by act of Parliament had barred his mother’s Beaufort family from ever laying claim to the throne. Among his cousins was the duke of Somerset; his uncles included Jasper Tudor, with whom the thirteen-year-old boy had travelled up to London that October, and Henry VI himself. Later that month, at the bishop of London’s palace, Henry Tudor was presented to the tremulous king. Decades later, it was said that Henry VI had detected kingliness in him, going so far as to say that both ‘we and our adversaries’ – the houses of Lancaster and York – ‘must yield and give over the dominion’ to his nephew: in other words, that Henry Tudor would be the boy to unite the warring factions of England. Though that account may have been sprinkled with more than a little mythologizing Tudor stardust, the encounter was a statement of intent on the Beauforts’ part.
That autumn, as the Beauforts lobbied intensively for the earldom’s return – Lady Margaret, not for the last time, pulling the strings – Clarence received a barrage of approaches on the topic, among which were no fewer than six visits from Henry Tudor’s stepfather. On 24 February, with Clarence worn down, the parties settled on a fudged compromise: Henry Tudor would inherit the earldom of Richmond on Clarence’s death. Neither side was particularly happy. Tudor was unlikely to get his hands on his estates for some time – unless, of course, something happened to Clarence. This unpleasant episode drove home to the duke the precariousness of his position in the new dispensation: what could happen to his Richmond estates could happen elsewhere. His growing sense of isolation only increased with the behaviour of all the Lancastrian families close to Henry VI, his wife and son. They were, he felt, constantly ‘labouring’ – scheming – ‘among themselves’. All of this, Clarence was sure, led only in one direction: a growing and ‘fervent’ conspiracy to destroy him ‘and all his blood’. Clarence was right to be paranoid. He was convinced that Lancastrian families like the Beauforts did ‘not in any way have any righteous title’ to the English crown. But then, they thought much the same about him.37
As a source close to Edward in exile put it, Clarence had begun to wake up to the fact that he was worse off in the new regime than he had been under the old. With the prospect of a ‘mortal war’ looming between the two sides, the division between him and his exiled brothers now made the disintegration of the house of York a distinct possibility. Even should Clarence emerge from the fratricidal showdown alive, he would be of no use whatsoever to the new Lancastrian regime that he had helped to bring into being: indeed, he would be in ‘as great, or greater danger’ than he was already. As Yorkist agents picked up on Clarence’s increasing openness to suggestions that his quarrel with his brothers was ‘unnatural’ and ‘against God’, the channels of dialogue began to open, ‘by right covert ways and means’.38
Although Clarence’s relationship with Edward had splintered almost beyond repair, he had never lost contact with the women of his family. His first contacts with the exiles had come through the likes of his mother Cecily – who, as she had done in the crisis months of 1461, had remained entrenched and defiant at the family home of Baynard’s Castle – and his eldest sister Anne, for whom the new regime had meant the doubly grim prospect of having to give up her lover, Edward’s chamber servant Thomas St Leger, for her volatile Lancastrian husband Henry Holland, duke of Exeter, newly returned from exile. Other tracks of communication came through the loyalist Bourchier brothers: the Cardinal Archbishop Thomas Bourchier, that most dextrous of Yorkist mediators, who a decade previously had persuaded Edward’s father Richard of York to retract his claim to the throne; and his older brother Henry, Edward’s household steward. The previous October both men had been arrested, then released; both were now in close communication with Clarence.39
On 27 February Warwick left London for Dover to await the arrival of Margaret of Anjou and her son, who were again trying to make the crossing to England. Warwick’s feelings about their impending arrival were probably mixed. On the one hand, they could lend his regime the credibility it continued to lack in the eyes of the Lancastrian nobility; on the other, their presence alone might begin to erode his authority. For now the question remained moot: Warwick ‘tarried at the sea side’ until it became clear that bad weather had once again prevented Margaret and her son from leaving port. Whatever was going on in Warwick’s mind, something decisive had shifted in Clarence’s. Whereas he had acted as Warwick’s proxy in the capital during the earl’s earlier absences, in late February he left the poisonous atmosphere of London, heading west to his Somerset estates. He had had enough.40
On 18 February Edward and his group of exiles left Bruges on the first stage of their journey back to England. Away at the port of Vlissingen, on Walcheren island, four large ships rode at anchor, provided, fitted out and provisioned by the energetic Gruuthuse and his influential father-in-law Henrik van Borsselen, who had loaned Edward his own ship, the Antony, and whose web of contacts had helped broker Edward’s agreement with the apparently irreconcilable Hanse. In the fleet now assembled at Vlissingen were fourteen heavily armed Hanse warships. Having pursued Edward into exile, the Hanse were now tasked with carrying him back safely across the North Sea and for ‘fifteen days after’ – in case the invasion went badly and a swift getaway was needed.41
Edward’s departure from the city that for the previous five weeks had been his adoptive home saw the king at his crowd-pleasing best. He left Bruges on foot, through streets packed with well-wishers, acknowledging the applause and roars of encouragement. Passing through the great gate of Dampoort, he walked the next five miles, the crowds milling around him, urging him on. At Damme, he and his men continued their journey by boat, weaving through the complex of canals and out into the North Sea, round the coast to Vlissingen and their waiting fleet.
The mobilization of Edward’s invasion force had been rapid: barely six weeks. It was an impressive achievement, though one made easier by the fact that Edward’s force was small; it numbered barely two thousand men, who, though ‘well chosen’, were hardly enough on their own to regain a throne. Edward’s success would be heavily reliant on attracting loyalties in England – which, despite the assurances his agents had obtained, were by no means a given.
Impatient to get going, Edward and his close companions boarded the Antony on 2 March. While ‘the wind fell not good for him’, he refused to disembark.42 Nine days later, the exceptionally stormy season, which had stymied Margaret of Anjou’s two attempts to return to England, abated. On the 11th, seizing this window of ‘good wind and weather’, Edward’s fleet weighed anchor and, sails spread, headed out of Vlissingen and into the open sea, west, heading for the Norfolk coast.
A week later Ferry de Clugny, a Burgundian diplomat with vast experience of English affairs, wrote to a friend with news. After optimistic updates from the Burgundian frontline against the French, where the Burgundians had mounted a successful counter-offensive – everything was going well, Clugny opined, and the war would soon be over – he remarked that Edward had left Flanders. While Charles the Bold had thrown money at Edward’s invasion, Clugny continued, he wasn’t sanguine about Edward’s chances: ‘England is opposed to him’, Clugny ended hesitantly; ‘I hope this thing is over quickly.’ As news of Edward’s quest to regain his throne filtered out of Burgundy and through Europe, the Milanese ambassador Bettini summed up his prospects pithily. It was, he wrote, difficult to leave a house by the door and then try to go back in through the windows: ‘They think he will leave his skin there.’43