At the top end of the great London thoroughfare of Cheapside, in the shadow of St Paul’s, stood the church of St Michael-le-Querne. Taking its name from a corn market once held nearby, the church marked the entrance to another district, one concentrated on the street that ran arrow-straight along the northern boundary of St Paul’s Churchyard: Paternoster Row. Here, and in the adjoining lanes stretching north to the blood and noise of the shambles at Newgate, was the epicentre of England’s book trade: the stationers, as they were known. On the Row itself, thirty-odd shops were crammed: small, two-storey units, little more than ten feet wide by ten deep. In them worked parchmeners, textwriters, illuminators and bookbinders, laboriously copying out everything from legal documents to romances in the uniform scribal hands of the day. Brightly coloured initials and coats-of-arms were worked, together with animals and foliage whose tendrils strayed and wandered through books’ margins. The different texts – religious, historical, chivalric; from recipes and medical cures to navigational instructions and political tracts – were gathered together and stitched into the composite volumes that people kept by them. One such shop, next to St Michael-le-Querne itself, was owned by John Multon, a bookseller, translator and textwriter whose occasionally slapdash work was more than compensated for by his entrepreneurial spirit. Over the decades Multon had developed a keen eye for what sold and, with a thick book of city and courtly contacts, where to get hold of it. As well as an ever-popular backlist – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, mountains of John Lydgate’s interminable rhyme royal – he sold the texts everybody was talking about. Back in 1459, copies of the Somnium Vigilantis, the literary text condemning the Yorkist cause, could be found on his shelves; so too, in 1471, ballads celebrating Edward IV’s all-conquering return. It was hardly a surprise that in the autumn of 1472, timed to coincide with the opening of the new Parliament at Westminster, Multon put out the latest work by a man with whom he had a long association: Sir John Fortescue, the Lancastrian propagandist now eagerly embracing the house of York.1
As Edward set out to persuade a sceptical public to fall into line with his renewed plans for an invasion of France, he needed all the help he could get. In the previous decade, he had twice gone to the parliamentary well to draw taxes for military campaigns against Scotland and France. On both occasions the money’s disappearance into the bottomless pit of his dynastic plans had been a key driver of public anger against his regime. As Parliament convened that October, the king embarked on a sustained public relations exercise, one to which Fortescue’s A Declaration upon Certain Writings Sent Out of Scotland was mood music.
A self-exculpatory disavowal of his former Lancastrianism, the Declaration was a masterpiece of rhetorical contortion. Fortescue had, he confessed, been a biased ‘partial man’, fighting his former master Henry VI’s corner with any arguments that came to hand – arguments that had now, he was delighted to acknowledge, been comprehensively disproved in favour of the house of York. And what a blessing it was, Fortescue continued smoothly, that God had bestowed upon Edward IV the kingdoms of England and of France, because now his loyal subjects could, ‘without any doubt or scruple of conscience’, sign up to fight for him in France against the man who was currently occupying his throne there: Louis XI.2 All these themes were taken up in the regime’s opening salvo to Parliament: a lengthy peroration by John Alcock, bishop of Rochester, standing in for the absent chancellor Robert Stillington, being the first of ‘many speeches of remarkable eloquence’ intended to whip up war fever among the assembled Commons.3
Since the last time he had put the case for war to Parliament, back in 1468, Edward’s grip on power had clarified spectacularly. There could, Alcock asserted, be ‘no colour or shadow’ in anybody’s mind that Edward was now ‘sole and undoubted king’: king ‘in deed’ as he had always been ‘in right’. Yet although the root cause of England’s troubles, the house of Lancaster, was ‘extinct’, the symptoms of civil conflict persisted, with ‘many a great sore, many a perilous wound left unhealed’. The problem was, Alcock continued, that the armed retainers responsible for much of the recent and ongoing violence were those same people who, in times of conflict with external powers, the king would call on to defend England. If Edward were to mete out justice commensurate with their misdeeds, the country would be significantly weakened. There was, however, another solution: war against France. Such a campaign would redirect the violent impulses of ‘idle and riotous people’, restoring ‘peace inward’. It would also pit the country against its number one enemy, Louis XI, who, in stirring up the ‘most unnatural inward trouble’ and backing the aggression of other international powers – notably Scotland – was the chief source of all England’s problems, internal and external. Besides which, invading France would bring many material benefits: making the Channel safe for English trade; solving those niggling inheritance problems by providing land to redistribute to ‘younger sons and others’; and permanently ridding the country of the said ‘riotous persons’, by resettling them in France where they would garrison the lands that Edward would conquer. In any case, as Alcock pointed out, since the Norman Conquest no king had managed to impose justice, peace and prosperity in England except through ‘war outward’.4 And never had there been a more perfect time to invade.
The king had, Alcock said, already done all the heavy lifting, assembling a grand anti-French coalition at vast personal expense – judiciously, Alcock glossed over the fact that much of that expense had involved credit raised against the security of parliamentary taxation – and obtaining promises of military support from Burgundy and Brittany, guarantees of which were ‘ready to be shown and read’ to Parliament.
Together, the drip-feed of parliamentary speeches and cheerleading pieces had the desired effect. Edward’s invasion plans were, so it was reported, met by Parliament with ringing acclaim. Among those applauding loudest – their presence perhaps encouraging those inclined to give a more muted response – were the thirty-nine members of Parliament who were men of the king’s household.5 The tax was voted: a staggering £118,625 to keep an army of thirteen thousand archers in the field for twelve months; the invasion would take place on or before 1 April the following year. No sooner had Parliament signed off the tax than, with predictable inevitability, Edward’s carefully assembled coalition began to unravel.
If the flaky loyalties of Francis of Brittany came as little surprise to Edward, given his vacillations of a few years before, the speed of his backsliding was remarkable. On 15 October 1472, barely a month after finalizing his treaty with Edward, and with French forces mobilizing threateningly on his borders, the Breton duke signed a panicky truce with Louis XI and sent envoys advising Edward and Charles the Bold to do the same. Charles promptly did so; three weeks later, the ink was drying on a new Franco-Burgundian truce. By early November, reports had reached London that the English taskforce sent to Brittany to bolster Francis’s meagre army had been decimated by the flux – dysentery – ‘and other epidemics’: those not already dead were coming ‘hastily home’.6
To add to the general sense of frustration that autumn, regional disorder and violence was increasing. Parliament fielded vocal complaints from representatives in the Welsh Marches about the ‘outrageous demeaning of Welshmen’.7 From the southwest to the midlands, the northwest and Richard’s new stamping ground of the northeast, old hatreds were stirred into life by Edward’s new political reordering of the previous year; by the deepening animus between his two brothers; and by talk of new conspiracy, involving Clarence.
On 25 November in the Flemish town of Gravelines, a few miles along the coast from Calais, the papal envoy Pietro Aliprando was fuming. Waiting to cross the Channel to England, he had had a run-in with customs officials at Calais. Rummaging through his baggage, they had found papal documents in support of the imprisoned George Neville – on whose behalf Aliprando was trying to intercede with Edward – and promptly frogmarched the diplomat off English territory. Aliprando poured out his frustrations in the first of a stream of dispatches to the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza, for whom he was also working, on the political situation in England.8
Still steaming about his treatment in Calais, Aliprando’s dispatches were long on speculation and snippiness. Edward might, he conceded, be a ‘handsome and worthy prince’, but his people were ‘bad and perverse’ and his council full of fat, ageing and anti-papal bishops. Relations between England and the Hanse merchants were once again at a low ebb, and Hanse pirates more or less controlled the Channel, plundering English vessels with impunity. Turning to the English plans for war against France, Aliprando thought there was little chance of Edward invading soon, given the mistrust between him and Charles the Bold – brothers-in-law they may have been, Aliprando added, but they were ‘not good friends’ – and the English propensity to be long on talk and short on action. Moreover, things in England were ‘doubtful and changeable’. If Edward were really to lead an army into France, he would have to be very confident indeed in the people who would rule England in his absence.
For, Aliprando concluded, the people didn’t love Edward. They saw him as weak and wobbly: ‘a tavern bush’, an inn sign swinging helplessly in the political breeze. They longed for a strong leader, someone who could get a grip on the country, and impose law and order with an iron rule: ‘another Warwick’.
Reading between the lines, it was clear where Aliprando had got his information: George Neville, whose cultural sophistication and instinctive papal sympathies played well with Aliprando, as with papal envoys before him. Somehow, he had managed to make contact with the archbishop in his Hammes prison. Certain details, such as the fact that Edward still owed Neville 20,000 ducats, could only have come from the archbishop himself; so too, very probably, the contemptuous dismissal of Edward’s wavering kingship.
On the face of it, the ‘tavern bush’ was an image that sat oddly with the implacable victor of Barnet and Tewkesbury. George Neville, though, knew Edward as well as anybody. During the late 1460s he had witnessed at first hand Edward’s tentative, lackadaisical leadership, his tendency to let things drift and his inability to command the hearts of the people – weaknesses that, along with Warwick and Clarence, Neville had exploited and punished. While Aliprando and Neville both had their agendas, even those well-disposed to Edward remarked on similar flaws. At their annual conclave, the members of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece underwent a process of self-examination, each knight’s character and actions reviewed by his peers. This included absent members, of which Edward was one – and, with Edward having recently been among his brother knights during his Flanders exile, they had plenty of first-hand evidence to go on. Their analysis of Edward was full of praise: he was a courageous and skilled fighter, virtuous and a good friend. Then, however, came the criticism. Edward, his fellow knights agreed, was not blessed with foresight: with greater awareness, he might have spotted the dangers which had resulted in the reigniting of England’s civil wars and his own exile. Moreover, the English king had ‘so little self-confidence’ that unless those trusted advisers close to him praised his plans and schemes, he would ‘not dare to carry them out’; nor would he do anything unless backed by his men. Whether this trait was the fault of nature or nurture, the knights couldn’t say.
Implicit in the knights’ critique was not only the suggestion that Edward was fundamentally lazy, but that he was in the habit of leaning on a circle of friends whose approbation he craved, and without which he felt – as the knights’ appraisal put it – ‘diffident’: doubtful, uncertain, fearful. If, in other words, you scratched the surface of Edward’s awesome royal charisma, you found a thin-skinned insecurity, an inability to accept criticism and a constant desire for affirmation. All of which chimed with Aliprando’s ‘tavern bush’ insult.
Aliprando found George Neville’s character assassination of Edward seductive. If, he opined, Neville could escape from custody, ‘he will yet accomplish something’, not least because a new figurehead, ‘another Warwick’, was manoeuvring to overthrow the king: ‘his brother the duke of Clarence’.9
Despite his professed aim to give Sforza ‘truthful and agreeable advices’, Aliprando was drawn to rumour like a moth to a flame: unfounded gossip about Clarence’s intrigues was catnip to him. But while Clarence, still incensed at being deprived of a chunk of the Warwick inheritance that he believed to be rightfully his, continued to square up to his brother Richard, such talk of rebellion against Edward seemed wide of the mark. There was no specific information that Clarence was up to anything. As Edward knew from bitter experience, though, local trouble could, if effectively harnessed, quickly blow up into regime-challenging violence. It would pay the king to keep a particularly close eye on the way Clarence ran his estates, the activities of his followers, and the duke’s own movements – and in all this Edward was reminded constantly by the people who clustered around him. Foremost among these were the queen’s family, ever-mindful of the savagery with which Clarence had moved against them after Edgecote; the king’s own household men, their memories of Clarence’s serial disloyalties still raw; and Richard himself.
Throughout the early months of 1473, Edward tried tirelessly to resurrect his plans for war against France. Royal diplomats shuttled between London and Edinburgh, trying to prise Scotland away from its traditional alliance with France. In the Low Countries, Edward’s secretary William Hatteclyffe sat down for talks with the Hanse merchants: still stewing over Edward’s failure to fulfil his promises to them, Hanse privateers had launched a fresh onslaught against English shipping. Meanwhile, an embassy led by Lord Hastings arrived at Charles the Bold’s court bearing terms and conditions for the joint Anglo-Burgundian invasion, on which Edward’s ‘affection was now greatly set’. Edward’s demands included ten thousand Burgundian troops, under English command – and he wanted them by April that year, when he planned to cross to France.10 The English ambassadors found Charles with his gaze turned eastward. Desperate to fulfil his long-harboured dreams of expansion into the Rhineland, and the transformation of Burgundy from a duchy into a sovereign state, Charles’s military ambitions clearly lay, as far as Edward was concerned, in precisely the wrong direction. Charles, who didn’t want Louis’ armies bothering him while his back was turned, had already come to terms with the delighted French king. That March, his invasion plans clearly going nowhere for the time being, Edward followed suit, buying time by concluding a year-long truce with France. He didn’t bother telling Parliament, which had just voted him another tax.11
It did so grudgingly. If Edward’s slick public-relations campaign of the previous autumn had quelled the Commons’ unease over his habitual misspending of taxes, those concerns quickly resurfaced. Even as the invasion was postponed, Edward – with the backing of the lords – was twisting Parliament’s arm to hand over the money to him as soon as it had been collected. Throughout the country, as the impact of the taxes bit, Sir John Paston – one of the MPs who had voted for Edward’s demands – received a letter from the family home in Norfolk: ‘rather the devil, we say’, grumbled his younger brother, ‘than you should grant any more taxes’, an observation which Sir John met with a discreet silence.12
Edward, as usual, was exploring other sources of credit. February found Louis XI chuntering about a familiar financial bugbear of his: the bank of Medici, which, not content with having underwritten Margaret of York’s wedding and Edward’s conquering return from his Burgundian exile, was continuing to extend finance to the English government. When a representative of the bank’s newly reopened branch in Lyons arrived at the French court, one of Louis’ advisers pulled him aside to tell him in no uncertain terms that Lorenzo de’ Medici’s money made the French king ‘more wars than the enemy’.13
The Medici, though, had long since lost control over their own lending policies – at least as far as their London branch was concerned. Despite constant and increasingly emphatic reprimands from head office, Gherardo Canigiani had gone on lending to Edward. His total loans to the regime now stood at a vertiginous £26,000, making the Medici by some distance the largest single creditor of Edward’s reign. For Canigiani, it made sense. His loans were always secured, mostly with the coveted export licences, and with Edward genuinely appreciative of Canigiani’s support ‘in our great necessity’, the Medici were in prime position to take advantage of business opportunities as they arose.14 The problem was, there weren’t enough of them. From Florence, all Canigiani’s panicked superiors saw was a massive balance of payments deficit, the value of English wool and cloth exports nowhere near offsetting the Medici’s loans and imports – chiefly alum and fine textiles – into England. Writing to Tommaso Portinari in Bruges, Lorenzo de’ Medici urgently told him to take control of the London office. Canigiani, he implied, had gone native – ‘he has served the king with our money’ – while his loans threatened to provoke a crisis with France that the Medici could ill afford.
All of which was compounded by disaster. Late that April, off the Flanders coast east of Calais, two Medici galleys loaded with alum and luxury goods for the English market were intercepted by Hanse privateers. One of the galleys managed to outrace its pursuers and reach the safety of Southampton. The pirates ran down and boarded the other, the San Matteo, towing it off to Danzig. Its cargo of alum, valued at 40,000 florins, was a huge loss to the Medici. Other injured parties included Agnolo Tani, the troubleshooter who had declared his experience of dealing with the London branch akin to that of trying to revive a corpse. On the San Matteo was an artwork he had commissioned from a Bruges-based artist called Hans Memling, a spectacular Last Judgment flanked by portraits of Tani and his wife, which was being shipped back to Florence; now, it was taken to Danzig, where it was given pride of place in St Mary’s Church.15 Then there was a group of London mercers, who had shipped goods in the San Matteo on the understanding that it had been fully insured. It hadn’t been, and they now found themselves ‘utterly deceived’. The man who now vigorously took up their case with Edward and the Medici was Canigiani. Both the loss of the San Matteo – itself hardly Canigiani’s fault – and the arrival in London of a henchman of Portinari’s, Cristofano Spini, who promptly swindled Canigiani in a business deal, tipped Lorenzo de’ Medici over the edge. Later that year, Canigiani was sacked. He didn’t seem to mind much. Promptly marrying the widow of a rich London merchant, he took English citizenship, whereupon a grateful Edward gave him a key post in Calais, as keeper of the exchange there. He was well aware of how well Canigiani had served him.16
In mid-April Edward left London on progress, in an effort to restore royal control in regions of chronic disorder. His itinerary would take him on an arc through the midlands to the Welsh borders. Apart from mollifying the disgruntled commons, the king had particular aims in view. For a start, it was all too clear that – in a reversal of the line that outward war would bring inward peace – a long military campaign against France could hardly be undertaken without first solving domestic political problems. For the problem of Wales and the Marches, Edward had alighted on an idea that dovetailed neatly with his ambitions for his own son and heir. He would hand the little boy – and the newly reconfigured council who represented his interests – sweeping powers to crack down on disturbances and to enforce royal authority. Before he left London, Edward sent the little prince on ahead, together with Queen Elizabeth and members of his council; he would link up with them at Ludlow later in the summer.
As Edward rode into the east midlands, it was turning into a fine spring. With him were some of his heavy hitters: his chamberlain William Hastings and Thomas, Lord Stanley, his steward and linchpin in England’s northwest; Anthony Woodville; the duke of Buckingham; and, above all, his brother Richard – who, doubtless, took the opportunity presented by the long journey to discuss with Edward his aims and desires. Clarence wasn’t with them. There was a sense of purpose in Edward’s progress and, also, of vigilance. There would be trouble, people said, before May was out.17
On 16 April, Good Friday, Sir John Paston was riding eastwards. He was heading for the Kent coast to take ship for Calais, where he was serving under Hastings’ command. Staying the night at Canterbury, he wrote to his brother. Edward’s truce with France was now general knowledge, while the detachment of archers he had promised Charles the Bold the previous autumn – which, in fact, had never made it across the Channel – had been demobilized and were ‘coming home by the highwayful’. Sir John feared for his belongings, brought on by carriage behind him, but in the end they turned up: ‘all was safe’. In London, meanwhile, there were widespread rumours about a ‘work’ – a plot – of some sort. A soothsayer Paston knew, a man called Hogan from a well-to-do Norfolk family, had been arrested by royal agents and brought to the Tower: his ‘old tales’, apparently, prophesied unrest that spring. Hogan was interrogated and threatened with execution for provoking unrest. But, as it turned out, he was right.18 A few days previously, Paston told his brother, the fugitive Lancastrian earl of Oxford had been spotted at the French Channel port of Dieppe, preparing to sail with a flotilla of twelve ships.
Since his raids on Calais the previous year, Oxford had sought backing from Louis XI. Casting around for ways to distract Edward from his invasion plans, the French king had thrown a modest amount of money the earl’s way, fitting out a small fleet to carry him and his men to England ‘to do what he can against king Edward’. A Milanese ambassador at Louis’ court reported that Oxford was going to try to revive Warwick’s networks and ‘to become leader of the earl’s party’ – though in the same breath he acknowledged ruefully that he had little idea of what was going on in England, and had heard ‘a great variety of things’. There was another interpretation: that Oxford was going to link up with the nobleman who had inherited Warwick’s earldom and his networks in the midlands – Clarence.19
As the rumours escalated, so too did the arrests. A contact of Paston’s told him that Oxford was due to attempt a landing on the East Anglian coast, where around ‘a hundred gentlemen in Norfolk and Suffolk’ had agreed to turn out for him. Shortly after their conversation, the same man was detained, accused of raising funds for Oxford’s cause, and interrogated. For his part, Paston was anxious to put distance between himself and the earl. Back in 1471, the Pastons’ decision to follow Oxford, and with him Lancaster, had seen Sir John narrowly escape execution and had left the family’s fortunes on the brink of disaster. Now, writing to his brother in Norfolk, he dismissed the rumours of conspiracy as ‘flying tales’. For all that, he seemed to know an awful lot, right down to the date of Oxford’s proposed landing, which, ‘if wind and weather serve him’, would be on 27 May, eight days after the feast day of St Dunstan. All of which seemed to send a veiled warning to his brother: if approached by the plotters, don’t get involved. ‘God have you in keeping’, he concluded, meaningfully.20
Paston’s timings were only a day out. On 28 May, returning from a fruitless trip to Scotland in search of support – James III, now twenty and eager for a rapprochement with Yorkist England, batted the rebel earl away – Oxford made landfall at St Osyth on the Essex coast, a stone’s throw from one of his manors at Wivenhoe.21 Edward’s intelligence, though, had been good. The area bristled with royal forces: the retinues of Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, and lords Dinham and Duras. Oxford’s supporters in the region wisely stayed at home. Equally wisely, Oxford made himself scarce. His small fleet retreated to the Isle of Thanet off the easternmost tip of Kent, where it remained, ‘hovering’, preying on passing ships.
News of the earl’s attempted landing had, Paston wrote wryly, ‘saved Hogan his head’: now, the king was taking the soothsayer’s prognostications seriously. Although Oxford’s landing had been repulsed, the very fact of its attempt seemed to heighten the febrile mood. In London, people started to arm themselves; they didn’t know quite why, but it felt good to be prepared. Armed men of the king’s household appeared on the city streets; so too did Clarence’s retainers, identifiable by the black bull badge conspicuously pinned to their jackets.22
Mention of Clarence led Paston on to news of the earl of Warwick’s widowed countess, Anne, who remained under armed guard in the Hampshire abbey of Beaulieu. Anne was a much-sought-after lady, her dower estates – part of the Warwick inheritance – a particular bone of contention between Clarence and Richard. After the battle of Tewkesbury, Edward had initially granted the bulk of the countess’s estates to Clarence; then, following the brothers’ tetchy meeting at Sheen the previous year, he had reallocated them to Richard. Clarence refused to hand them over. Anne herself, appalled at the prospect of losing her hereditary lands to either brother, had energetically lobbied Edward and those close to him, pleading to be allowed to keep what was legally hers; questions had even been raised in Parliament. Finally, Paston heard, the countess was ‘out of sanctuary’ – but not on her own terms.
In a move sanctioned by the king himself, the countess of Warwick had been given into the custody of a group of Richard’s servants. Now, she was being brought north to Richard’s base of Middleham Castle, which had once been her home. Aiming to slice through the thicket of legal complexity preventing the transfer of the countess’s estates to Richard, Edward and his brother had – perhaps in discussion on the king’s leisurely progress into the midlands that spring – cooked up a plan. It allowed Richard, ‘with the king’s assent’, to make a barefaced land grab, one that spoke volumes for the regime’s priorities. And, Paston added with understatement, ‘some men say that the duke of Clarence is not agreed’.23
Richard was proving remorseless in pursuit of his rights. Among the lands which he believed were rightfully his – given to him as a child by Edward, only to be taken back and regranted elsewhere – were the estates of the Lancastrian earl of Oxford. When, after Tewkesbury, Oxford had forfeited his title and estates, Richard (who had instructed his secretary to include the original, superseded grant in his cartulary of lands and offices) badgered Edward for the lands. Edward duly let his brother help himself. It wasn’t only the exiled earl who suffered, but his family. His wife, Margaret, given not a penny of income by Edward or Richard, was said to be existing solely on charitable handouts. Then, at Christmas 1472, Richard had gone after Oxford’s mother.
Elizabeth, dowager countess of Oxford, may have been sixty-three and infirm, but she wasn’t stupid. Realizing what a precarious position she was in, with her sons declared legally dead and unable to inherit, she had attempted to protect her own considerable estates by ‘enfeoffing’ them, making them over to a number of trustees, with the aim of eventually handing them on to her heirs. Or so she hoped. Richard had other ideas. That Christmas, he rode over to the Essex nunnery of Stratford-le-Bow, where Elizabeth was living, and told her bluntly that ‘the king his brother’ had given him custody of the countess and her lands. Unmoved by the countess’s evident distress – she wept, one of Richard’s men later recollected, and made ‘great lamentation’ – he demanded that she hand over all her ready cash before abducting her. Imprisoned in nearby Stepney, the countess was kept under house arrest until, ‘for fear of her life’, she was forced to sign away everything.
That the king had, at the very least, turned a blind eye to his brother’s rapacity was clear. Edward’s indulgent attitude was hardly surprising. After all, it was in tune with his own actions: back in the freezing winter of 1464 he had subjected the duke of Somerset’s mother to systematic, vindictive abuse as a way of getting back at the favourite who had abandoned him. For his part, Richard was simply taking a leaf out of his brother’s book. Others helped him: Edward’s chamber treasurer Thomas Vaughan, who lent Richard the Stepney house where he threatened the countess; and John Howard – the countess’s own nephew – who ‘gave great words of menace’ to members of her entourage.24
If such behaviour on the part of the Yorkist establishment was shocking, it wasn’t unexpected. It was a twisted manifestation of Edward’s philosophy of ‘family first’, which maintained that power should be concentrated in the hands of the ‘king’s blood’. As close family, Richard deserved to be ‘honoured and enhanced of right and power’; therefore, he was entitled to do as he pleased. Nonetheless, Edward knew perfectly well that what his brother was doing was wrong. When, a few years later, he was approached by a petitioner for advice on whether to buy from Richard a London townhouse previously owned by the earl of Oxford, Edward warned him against it. The title deeds, the king added, were secure in ‘my brother’s hands’ but would be ‘dangerous’ for anyone else, given that – as Edward put it – Richard had ‘compelled and constrained’ the countess of Oxford to give him the property in question. Edward, in other words, knew exactly what his brother was doing, and didn’t care.
When, five months after Richard’s abduction of the countess of Oxford, the scenario repeated itself in the case of Warwick’s widow Anne, it transpired that Edward was prepared not only to sit back and let Richard get on with it, but actively to facilitate the move. What was more, in doing so he was deliberately backing Richard against their brother Clarence.
Describing what happened to Anne countess of Warwick in the spring of 1473, Sir John Paston was studiedly neutral. But, reading between the lines, it was clear what was going on. While she may have been ‘out of sanctuary’, Anne had not been set at liberty. Richard had abducted her, keeping her securely at Middleham with the aim of forcing her to hand over her estates to him.
The man whom Richard entrusted with the mission was a young Suffolk knight named James Tyrell.25 Tyrell’s rise had been rapid. Abandoning his family’s Lancastrian associations with the earl of Oxford – his father had been beheaded alongside the old earl back in 1462 – he had thrown in his lot with the Yorkists. At Tewkesbury, his fierce fighting had seen him knighted on the battlefield, following which he had quickly become one of Richard’s closest servants and councillors. Three years younger than Richard, Tyrell was still only seventeen.
Writing from his chambers at Staple Inn, in the west London suburb of Holborn, the lawyer William Dengayn provided details of what was essentially a stitch-up between Edward and Richard. Apparently responding to the countess’s lobbying, Edward had restored ‘all her inheritance’ to her and mandated her release from sanctuary, whereupon she had then – apparently of her own free will – ‘granted it unto my lord of Gloucester with whom she now is’. The idea that the countess had spent so much time petitioning for the return of her lands, only to make them over to her son-in-law Richard, stretched credulity. Rather, this was a fait accompli, one that forced the countess to give away the lands to whose possession she was entitled in law. As Dengayn put it, with the hint of a lawyerly raised eyebrow, ‘divers folks marvel greatly’.26
To Edward, it was a neat solution, a way of forcing Clarence to stick to the terms of the Sheen agreement; perhaps, too, it was a warning shot across the bows of a brother around whom talk of conspiracy continued to congeal. Whatever the case, it was evident that, as far as the Warwick inheritance was concerned, Edward was lending a sympathetic ear to his youngest brother. To Clarence, deprived of a large chunk of estates that the king had originally granted him, it looked suspiciously as though Edward was favouring Richard – and persecuting him, Clarence, in the process.
Late that spring, the fine weather turned remorseless. It was a ‘great hot summer’, reported one chronicler, ‘for both man and beast’. With the heat came disease, and death was everywhere. Epidemics of dysentery took hold. Men out harvesting in the fields ‘fell down suddenly’ – though at least they had had a harvest to gather. In southern Europe, it was said, the heat had ‘burnt away wheat and all other grains and grass’, so much so that a bushel of wheat now cost twenty shillings. That a time of trouble was coming was confirmed in people’s minds by fearful portents. A voice was heard ‘crying in the air’ at various places between Leicester and Banbury, shouting ‘Bows! Bows!’; some said that the voice came from a headless man. Near St Albans, the River Ver burst its banks: heavy rainfall earlier in the year had slowly filtered through chalk to raise the groundwater, to spectacular effect. Such flooding at a time of drought was the phenomenon people knew as the ‘woe water’: a token of ‘dearth, or of pestilence, or of great battle’. Similar floodwaters had been reported in Kent, Sussex and the west midlands. Those that saw them knew that ‘woe was coming to England’.27
During these enervating months, the king circled the midlands warily, alert to signs of trouble. As Richard, hungry to impose himself, got to grips with the government of his adoptive northeast, Edward put a restraining hand on his brother’s collar, showing him the necessity of pragmatism and flexible thinking in the pursuit of peace and order. Richard, all aggrandisement, had been offering cash payments and distributing his boar badge to servants of the powerful young earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, trying to recruit the earl’s men in his own backyard. Percy had bristled. The king, acutely aware of Percy’s importance to royal control of the region, extracted a promise from Richard to back off, insisting that the pair thrash out their differences and find a way of working together.28 The following month, he appointed Richard head of a commission to look into the entrenched feud between the two north-western families of Stanley and Harrington. Knowing full well Richard’s commitment to the solidly Yorkist Harringtons, Edward ordered him to resolve the dispute in favour of the Stanleys – which made sense, given their practically hegemonic power in the northwest, and the fact that Lord Stanley was Edward’s own household steward. Richard agreed to do so. Yet, faced with obeying his brother the king or abandoning the Harringtons – a family who, with close connections among Richard’s own servants, looked to him for protection and lordship – Richard displayed another kind of flexibility. Over the following months the work of his royal commission gently ground to a halt, the Harringtons left unbothered. The case was quietly dropped.29
As summer wore on, Edward lingered in the Welsh borders, partly in an attempt to bring the independent-minded Marcher lords to heel, partly to be near the queen, now heavily pregnant. At Shrewsbury on 17 August, Elizabeth gave birth to a second boy, whom she named Richard. Then, towards the end of September, Edward set up his firstborn son and heir with a separate household at Ludlow, complete with a set of ordinances directing all aspects of his upbringing. The man to whom, that November, Edward entrusted the ‘guiding of our said son’s person’ was the prince’s maternal uncle, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville. Woodville was in many respects an ideal choice: polished, highly literate, with impeccable chivalric credentials and a record of unswerving loyalty to the dynasty of which he was now a blood relation. He was given oversight of the prince’s upbringing and the smooth functioning of his household and council, whose servants were all answerable to Woodville himself. The prince’s finances were secured in a coffer with three locks, the keys to which were held by Queen Elizabeth, Anthony Woodville, and the man appointed both the president of the prince’s council and his tutor, John Alcock, bishop of Rochester.30
For all Edward’s commitment to enforcing his laws, and his energetic judicial progress through the country that summer, disturbances continued to flare. According to a Milanese ambassador at the French court, the earl of Oxford had sent Louis XI the wax seals of twenty-four knights ‘and one duke’ who had committed to making war on Edward; along with this evidence of support for his project of regime change, Oxford was demanding for a ‘good sum’ of money from the French king. The identity of the duke was left unspoken: many believed it to be Clarence. Louis, though, demurred, apparently suspecting Oxford of exaggerating his support, and faking the seals. With no money forthcoming from the French king, that summer Oxford abandoned his hideout on the Isle of Thanet and with his small fleet drifted westwards along England’s south coast, plundering hapless merchant ships – and, perhaps, hoping to find backing in the southwest, where Clarence was especially strong. Edward, though, was again one step ahead; early that summer he had put the sheriff of Devon and his networks on high alert, ordering him to prevent Oxford landing and to keep an eye out for any unlawful gatherings. At the end of September, running out of options, Oxford reached the western edge of England. He seized St Michael’s Mount off the tip of Cornwall – the kind of place, remarked one chronicler, in which twenty men could hold out ‘against all the world’ – and hunkered down.31
On 6 November, Sir John Paston wrote uneasily to his brother from London: ‘The world seemeth queasy here.’ That autumn, fed up with what he saw as manoeuvres by his brother Richard, Clarence had had enough. Threatening to ‘deal with’ him, Clarence was openly recruiting as much hired muscle as he could. Richard, not one to take a backward step, was doing the same.
With the quarrel between the two threatening to explode into armed conflict, Edward again waded in. Preparing his own display of royal might – his household retinues made a conspicuous show of arming themselves – he announced that he would be ‘a stifler’ between his brothers, smothering their mutual antagonism. But if the king emphasized his own role as neutral arbiter, he was also prepared to follow through on his earlier warning to Clarence. If Clarence continued to be obstructive as far as the Warwick settlement was concerned, Edward was prepared to take away everything he had ever granted him.32
At Westminster, Parliament was again in session. Two of the items on its agenda were particularly significant. With Edward desperate to draw a line under his long-standing commercial war with the Hanse merchants, Parliament duly passed an act that conceded practically all the Hanse demands: the promises that Edward had made them during his exile in Flanders and which, back in England, he had then failed to fulfil. The act restored to the Hanse their lucrative trading privileges in England, with no reciprocal arrangements given to English merchants – but at least Edward could be sure that his seaborne invasion of France, when it eventually came, would not be harassed by Hanse pirates. Then came the second big piece of parliamentary business: an act of resumption.
Edward had carried out these sweeping re-appropriations of crown lands earlier in his reign; like others before it, this one was intended to convey the king’s commitment to sound financial practice, to show that he was in control of his landed assets and his income. This act, as one commentator remarked, was especially severe, as it took back into royal control all grants made by Edward since his accession in 1461. There followed the inevitable frantic scramble by those possessing such grants to exempt their property from annexation. As usual, a substantial list of ‘provisos’, exemptions, was drawn up. Richard’s name was on the list. Clarence’s wasn’t.33
Edward’s reasoning appeared straightforward. Some eighteen months before, he had warned Clarence that any failure to co-operate would be met with royal confiscation of his lands. With Clarence intransigent, the king had duly activated his threat. But, in Sir John Paston’s view, another motive animated Edward’s move against his brother. Clarence’s raising of troops wasn’t simply a frustrated, flailing lunge against Richard: there was, Paston wrote, ‘some other thing intended … some treason conspired’. Paston didn’t elaborate, nor did he comment on the source of the rumours – but given his own connections at court, it was a fair bet that they emanated from circles close to the king himself. In this context, Edward’s resumption of Clarence’s lands carried with it an implicit warning: that if his brother was intent on trying anything silly, the king was watching.
Towards the end of November, Paston wrote home again. After various requests – he was off again to Calais and, ‘to avoid idleness’, was desperate for his musical instruments, stored in ‘a chest in my chamber at Norwich’ – he updated his brother on the political situation. ‘I trust to God’, he commented, hoping that fraternal peace was about to break out, ‘that the two dukes of Clarence and Gloucester shall be set at one by the award of the king.’34 It was wishful thinking. Passed that December, the act of resumption came as a devastating blow to Clarence’s status, the position of pre-eminence that he believed was his by right.
Unlike the earl of Warwick, who back in the 1460s had typically kept his emotions to himself until he could vent them in the privacy of his own chamber, Clarence had always worn his heart on his sleeve. (Although, it had to be said, Warwick had never experienced the kind of humiliation that Edward was now visiting on his brother.) Clarence made little effort to conceal his frustrated rage. He was, people noted, ‘extremely sore at heart’.35
No sooner was the Christmas feasting over than Edward moved against his brother. On 9 January 1474, the king started to take possession of Clarence’s confiscated estates. In showing he meant business, Edward targeted a portfolio of land stretching across the north and east midlands, centred on the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tutbury, possession of which had helped make Clarence a big player in the region.
Back in 1472, as Clarence tried to make influential friends close to the king, he had appointed William Hastings steward of Tutbury. His gesture had had unintended consequences. Recent disorder in the region had seen local families, sensitive to shifts in power, turn towards Hastings for leadership and justice: Hastings had obliged, stepping in to deal with regional disputes on Edward’s behalf. Now, in repossessing the Tutbury estates, Edward conferred them on Hastings outright. In the spring of 1474, perhaps anticipating resistance from an intransigent Clarence, Edward rode into the midlands himself, Hastings by his side, to oversee the transfer of control to Hastings’ men.36
Edward was doing more than simply redistributing lands from one nobleman to another. Hastings had few connections with the lands now coming under his control. What he did have – and what attracted locals to him – was exceptional influence with the king, to whom he owed all his power. Unlike Clarence, Hastings knew his position as the king’s devoted servant and was perfectly happy with it. Accordingly, Hastings’ possession of the Tutbury estates was to be qualitatively different. Granted control of the estates for life, he was a crown officer, a glorified estate manager who commanded allegiances as the king’s representative in the region. That spring, Edward personally supervised the appointment of Hastings’ regional staff. Some of Clarence’s men were dismissed. Most, however, transferred easily to Lord Hastings, signing new indentures in which they were promised, as customary, ‘good lordship’ in exchange for their service – and, in becoming part of Hastings’ network, they effectively became part of the king’s own.37
As Edward toured the north midlands, the young Prince Edward’s new council was flexing its muscles in Coventry, a city with close connections to Clarence. That April, Coventry welcomed the three-year-old boy with a sequence of pageants enacting scenarios from the house of York’s history, accompanied by the city band and – in order to keep people really interested – conduits running with wine. At Bablake Gate, an actor dressed as Richard II revelled in the prince’s ancient lineage, rejoicing that ‘the right line of the royal blood is now as it should be’; further on, the sainted king Edward the Confessor reassured the little prince that he was watching over the house of York, reminding him how his father Edward IV had been driven from his throne ‘by full furious intent’, and giving thanks that England was now back ‘in your father’s hand’.38 In playing up Coventry’s special relationship with the prince, the city authorities also sought to gloss over its recent unfortunate associations with Henry VI’s brief restoration: the prince’s triumphant entrance confirmed that the city was back in the royal good books.
There was, however, more to the prince’s visit. As Warwick’s heir, he saw himself as the city’s overlord; the city, it seemed, saw likewise. Back in June 1472, after the contrite citizens had spent hundreds of pounds trying to work their way back into royal favour, it was Clarence whose mediation with his brother the king had finally obtained Coventry’s pardon. Yet in recent months Coventry had seen its fair share of disturbances, which Clarence had apparently failed to control. The prince’s council, tacitly backed by Edward himself, had stepped in: the boy’s arrival was a timely nod to the civic authorities as to whom they should be answering. Shortly before he left, the prince – or rather, his representatives, Anthony Woodville at their head – extracted from the mayor and corporation a new oath of allegiance.39
Seen one way, these were the actions of a concerned king, whose intervention through his son’s administration was simply intended to help Clarence out in an unstable region. From where Clarence was standing, things looked rather different. Hastings was already muscling in on his lands in the north and east midlands. Now the prince and his council, dominated by the ‘queen’s blood’, was encroaching on his authority in the west midlands, a region that Clarence ruled in his long-coveted capacity as inheritor to the earl of Warwick. Nor was that all. As he made this emphatic statement of royal control through his young son and heir, Edward was ramping up his involvement in Warwickshire, dispensing grants of land and office to local big men who already had links to Clarence. This was the kind of intervention that would inevitably result in the erosion of Clarence’s networks of influence, as men instead looked directly to the king and his heir for favour and justice – just as, on the Tutbury estates, they now looked to Edward’s representative, Hastings.40 Clarence, perhaps, didn’t have to be paranoid to feel that Edward was attempting to cut him down to size.
That year, a new book was in circulation at court. Back in 1471, shortly after Edward regained the throne, William Caxton had resigned his long-held governorship of the Merchant Adventurers. He was feeling tired – ‘age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the body’, he wrote – and in need of a change of scene. He had journeyed the two hundred miles east from Bruges to Cologne, where, with the encouragement of Edward’s sister Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, he settled down to finish a translation of the history of Troy on which he had been working fitfully for years. Cologne was a hub of the new technology of print. Ever the entrepreneur, Caxton was intrigued, then fascinated. He caught the bug. When, towards the end of 1472, he returned to Bruges, he took with him some cases of type and an assistant named Wynkyn de Worde; and he considered the business opportunities for the new technology back in his native England. In London and Westminster there existed a ready-made audience hungry for Burgundian culture. With his sharp eye for literary trends, Caxton would provide that culture, translated into English and in the most fashionable, up-to-date medium. One of his first books was an edition of a volume popular in Flanders but little known in England: the Jeu d’Echecs.
A book of advice, it was stuffed full of aphorisms and stories by ‘ancient doctors, philosophers, poets and of other wise men’. Knowing the constant demand for fashionable books on public morality, Caxton – as was becoming his hallmark – added a prologue and an epilogue to provide some context for his English readers, did a print run of his translation and shipped it across the Channel. In the prologue of what he called The Game and Playe of the Chesse, he dedicated the book to the patron under whose ‘noble protection’ he had made it: George, duke of Clarence.41
For all that Caxton made of Clarence’s support, there was little to suggest that the duke had had anything to do with the book at all. What encouragement there was stemmed, very probably, from the ‘mighty and virtuous’ princess who had already ‘commanded’ translations from Caxton: Clarence’s sister Margaret of Burgundy. In suggesting Caxton dedicate the book to Clarence, Margaret – who shared her husband Charles the Bold’s fear and loathing of the French king Louis XI – had a specific end in view. She wanted her brothers to stop quarrelling, make up and focus on the job in hand – the invasion of France.
In his epilogue, Caxton was a cheerleader for Edward’s French war. The way for Edward to ‘reign gloriously’ in unity with ‘the nobles of the kingdom’, he advised, was through conquest of his ‘rightful inheritance’: the French throne. Echoing the prevailing wisdom, Caxton argued that war was a route to national virtue, peace and prosperity, a way for putting ‘idle people’ to work and for trade to prosper. If all this seemed like an echo of Edward’s parliamentary propaganda, it was.42 The message of the Game and Playe of the Chesse was evident. In dedicating the book to Clarence, Caxton was gently proposing that he sublimate his fraternal rage and focus on Edward’s great project, helping to bring the king’s long-cherished plan to fruition. Whether or not Clarence read the book, whether it even reached him, was unclear. But over the following months, he seemed to absorb the message contained in Caxton’s epilogue.
During the first months of 1474, Edward’s French war still seemed a long way off. Parliament had reassembled briefly, expecting an update on his plans, before again being prorogued. No business had been done, and the frustrated lords and commons left with a series of royal excuses ringing in their ears: Edward’s chief partner in the invasion coalition, Charles the Bold, was distracted with his own expansionist military campaign; and besides, Edward had had his hands full with domestic problems. Foremost among which, of course, was the friction between his brothers.43
By the time Parliament was again recalled a few months later, a key cause of that unrest had been resolved. In mid-February the earl of Oxford, holding out on St Michael’s Mount, finally capitulated. The siege had been more long-drawn-out than it should have been, and Edward had had to sack the besieging commander, Henry Bodrugan, for fraternizing with Oxford instead of fighting him. Finally, when his men had all been bought off by bribes and royal pardons, Oxford surrendered, on condition that Edward spare his life. Following an uncomfortable audience with the king at Windsor Castle, the earl was taken across the Channel to Calais, where he was immured in the border fortress of Hammes along with his fellow prisoner George Neville. Though Oxford’s resistance had in the end proved little more than a costly nuisance to Edward, it had threatened much more.
Having tied up one loose end, Edward moved to knot another. The lesson he had tried to drive home to Clarence late the previous year had, it seemed, finally sunk in. That summer, Clarence finally agreed to the terms proposed by Edward for the splitting of the Warwick estates between himself and Richard. Then again, he had little choice: it was either that, or losing everything. In July, a mollified Edward returned most of Clarence’s confiscated lands to his brother; all except the wealthy lands around Tutbury, which remained in Hastings’ possession – as a reminder, perhaps, of what happened when you crossed the king.44
Having finally, as he thought, partitioned the Warwick estates to his brothers’ satisfaction, Edward forced through a parliamentary act enshrining it in law. It was a squalid piece of legislation. Warwick’s widow Anne was formally disinherited, her vast estates split between her two daughters – which in effect meant their husbands, Clarence and Gloucester. The Countess Anne herself was made ‘naturally dead’, the redistribution of her property ‘as good and effectual in law’ as if it had been passed on by inheritance. Edward had ridden roughshod over the accepted customs and laws of inheritance in order to promote his family’s interests, and had used Parliament, the highest court in the land, to legitimize his actions. It would not be the last time.
As the self-exculpatory wording of the act put it, the settlement was done for ‘various great and important reasons and considerations’ – the quarrel between his brothers, which Edward had otherwise struggled to control, and which had become so disruptive that it had become a major obstacle in Edward’s plans for his invasion of France. Now, Edward hoped, that particular boil had been lanced.45 He could turn his attention to his long-delayed war.
The official date of his departure for France, agreed with Parliament, was Michaelmas, the end of September. That summer, however, he had neither an army nor the means to pay for it. In the last years, Parliament had voted taxes to the tune of £118,000, the sum Edward needed to keep an army in the field for twelve months. Now, commissioners announced that barely a quarter of that total had been collected.
Yet there was, finally, a sense of momentum. The resolution of his brothers’ quarrel could now be added to breakthroughs on the diplomatic front. Following his settlement with the Hanse merchants, that July Edward trumpeted a new, wide-ranging treaty with Scotland, at its heart a marriage between his little daughter Cecily and the infant Scottish heir: one of France’s hitherto most reliable allies was isolated. Then, to his surprise and delight, Charles the Bold – who had paused in his eastern campaign long enough to remember quite how much he hated Louis XI – agreed to sign a new treaty of perpetual friendship, the cornerstone of which was a military alliance against France. With the twin problems of Scotland and the Hanse neutralized, and the might of Burgundy onside, Edward could start planning in earnest – provided, of course, that the Commons were prepared to help him make up the massive financial shortfall he faced.46
Parliament caught the mood. Extending the deadline for the departure of Edward’s army for France by two years, they reconfirmed the so-far-uncollected taxes. This still left Edward some £51,000 short, a sum that the Commons obligingly agreed to find. Given that they could hardly go back to taxpayers a third time, they cast around for fresh sources. Much of the shortfall was to be made up by targeting a demographic which, having ‘not any or but little land, or other freehold’, was usually exempt from taxation: the poor.47
Yet Edward’s mistrust of Charles the Bold hadn’t dissipated entirely – and with reason. As well as his new military alliance with Edward, Charles had, more or less simultaneously, renewed his truce with their mutual enemy, Louis XI. Edward also kept his options open. That August, an English herald arrived at the French court with a proposal from Edward. It was an offer of marriage, between his oldest daughter Elizabeth, now aged eight, and the dauphin, the French king’s heir. At the French court, genuine anxiety about the possibility of an English invasion mingled with the belief that, when it came to the crunch, Edward wouldn’t really go to war. As one Milanese ambassador reported, while people believed that Edward’s offer was ‘a sham’, intended to lull Louis into a false sense of security, they also felt that it was the product of genuine ill-feeling on Edward’s part towards his Burgundian brother-in-law. When pushed, the ambassador concluded, most believed that Edward wasn’t serious about invading. Everybody knew his fondness for the easy life, inclined as he was ‘towards quiet and peace rather than to war’.
Louis, though, was taking no chances. By September, with increasingly reliable reports confirming English military mobilization, he was reviewing his coastal defences and renewing his attempts to puncture Edward’s diplomatic alliances with Scotland and Burgundy. Louis also sent an embassy to England, headed by the marshal of his household, a prying man called Christophe Lailler, with a present for Edward of two coursers from his stables.48 When Lailler arrived a few weeks later, Edward was out of town, on progress. Lailler waited.
Along with the beautiful horses, Lailler brought another gift from Louis – or rather, three gifts: an ass, a wolf and a boar. The boar was the emblem of the duke of Brittany; the wolf, less heraldically evident, represented the slavering Charles the Bold. That left the ass, which, by extrapolation, could only be Edward. The ass didn’t have any heraldic connotations with the house of York; it simply showed what Louis thought of the English king.
Over the years, Louis and Edward had got used to trading insulting diplomatic gifts. This one, though, had a particular resonance. A typically antic gesture on Louis’ part, it brought to mind the tennis balls sent by the French dauphin to Henry V some sixty years before. Arguably, it was even more offensive. Edward’s response, like Henry V’s before him, was emphatic.
In October, in a letter widely circulated in England, he replied thanking Louis for his gifts, ‘for they be very necessary for war’. Turning Louis’ bestial analogy on its head, Edward confirmed that treaties had been made with both Charles the Bold and Duke Francis of Brittany, who had made a covenant with ‘the beasts of my country, to teach them the way into France’. Invoking a variety of heraldic animals, all references to his leading noblemen, Edward conjured up a picture of himself as a huntsman at the head of a pack of slavering beasts, inciting them on a vicious hunt through France.
For those with long memories, the metaphor recalled Edward’s relationship with Warwick back in 1460, the young bearward deploying his ravening bear against his Lancastrian enemies. Here again, in his letter to Louis, was the image of an English king in full control, forging his nobles’ aggressively independent instincts into a powerful weapon of state. Foremost among these mighty lords were ‘the black bull with the gilt horns’ and another boar: his brothers, Clarence and Richard. ‘Your mock’, Edward concluded on a note of threatening triumph, ‘shall turn you to shame,/ For I am master of the game.’49