In the corridors of Westminster during that summer of 1482, the afterglow of Richard’s Scottish campaign soon subsided. Among the more financially minded of Edward’s councillors there were mutterings about an expensive fiasco. Berwick had been a ‘trifling’ gain; besides which, it could only be a drain on royal resources, its upkeep costing some ten thousand marks a year. Talk had it that £100,000 had been squandered on Richard’s campaign: it was an exaggerated sum, put about by Westminster-centric civil servants with an equally caricatured view of the north – a region from where, as one of them put it dismissively, ‘all evil spreads’. Nevertheless, the whispering got to Edward. Having basked in the news of Berwick’s capture, he was soon obsessing about how much money had been spent on it – especially when it became clear that Richard’s campaign hadn’t actually solved his Scottish problem. He had renewed concerns about matters at the other end of the country too.1
In Calais, tensions were as high as they had been for years. Following Marie of Burgundy’s death earlier in the year, Louis XI had sought to exploit the resulting chaos. With his armies marching towards Flanders, Calais was as usual in the firing line. In between news of shipments and fluctuating exchange rates, the wool merchant William Cely reported how French troops had taken the town of Aire, a day’s ride south of the Pale, and a castle near St Omer ‘by means of treason’; now, they were marching on Gravelines, the key trading post through which English wool exports flowed to Flanders. Soon, Cely feared, the French would control all the overland routes out of Calais, leaving the business community there at the mercy of Louis. Given the situation, it was hardly surprising that William Hastings, head of the Calais garrison, had been a constant presence there since May: the town and its outlying defences bristled with his troops and a newly recruited force of a thousand Kentish archers.2 It wasn’t just the Pale’s external defences that preoccupied Hastings, but – with talk of treason in the air – security within Calais itself.
That August, Hastings’ agents uncovered a potentially catastrophic security breach: somebody had tried, and perhaps succeeded, in counterfeiting the keys to the city gates. The Calais council ordered a ‘great inquiry’ into the incident, following which blame was placed squarely on the shoulders of the man responsible for the town’s defences: its porter, Robert Ratcliffe. The council, headed by Hastings himself, took no chances. Ratcliffe and all the men in his pay were to be ‘put out of wages’, and were to leave Calais and the marches with ‘wives, children and goods’ by the following Friday ‘on pain of death’.3
Notwithstanding the febrile atmosphere, the Calais council’s response seemed an overreaction. A trusted Yorkist veteran, Ratcliffe had served in Calais since the early 1470s, and had proved his loyalty to the regime time and again, especially as a naval commander in the recent war against Scotland. He hardly seemed capable of a security lapse, let alone treason. Hastings, though, had eyes and ears throughout the Pale. It was one of these informers, one John Edwards, who had made detailed allegations against Ratcliffe. Edwards had thrown fuel on the fire by alleging that Ratcliffe hadn’t been acting alone. There were other, more powerful figures behind him: the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, and her son Thomas, marquis of Dorset.4
There was a political edge to the allegations and the Calais council’s uncompromising response. Ratcliffe, Hastings’ man, also had close connections with Anthony Woodville.5 In Hastings’ eyes, it was these increasingly cosy links with the Woodvilles that made Ratcliffe a problem.
Back in 1471, Edward had handed Woodville the crucial command of Calais, before changing his mind and giving it to Hastings. For Woodville, the loss rankled. He asked for an ‘exemplification’ or official copy of his one-time appointment as Calais’ governor – just in case, at some unspecified point in the future, a chance to reclaim the post might arise. He had apparently gone further, whispering in the king’s ear about Hastings’ unreliability in Calais. Woodville, indeed, may have been the source of talk, back in 1477, that Hastings’ Burgundian sympathies had got the better of him – jeopardizing both Edward’s cordial relations with Louis XI, and Calais itself.
Dorset was also apparently ‘suborning informers’ to brief against Hastings, going so far as to accuse him of treason, though the friction between the two had a different source. There was much to suggest that the convivial Dorset was muscling in on Hastings’ role as the fixer of all Edward’s desires – and that Hastings, sharply attuned to any challenge to his pre-eminence around the king, didn’t like it. Their mutual antipathy, whetted by a simmering regional rivalry in the east midlands (barely six miles separated Dorset’s manor of Bradgate from Hastings’ Kirby Muxloe), had long been common knowledge at court.6 Back in the spring of 1481, when Hastings left court for Calais, an agent of the Oxfordshire knight Sir William Stonor – then attempting to push forward some business matters with the help of influential contacts close to the king – wrote to his master urgently. Stonor should come to court as soon as he could, ‘for my lord of Gloucester, my lord Chamberlain, be gone, and now here be your friends’. Stonor’s friends were the Woodvilles, above all his brother-in-law, who was none other than Dorset himself. The implication was clear. Hastings and Richard disliked Dorset and his ‘friends’ enough to try and obstruct routes to the king’s favour. With both men absent, Stonor’s way to Edward, smoothed by his Woodville in-laws, was clear. Since that time, things had not improved.7
All this made Hastings and the Calais council ready to believe the explosive allegations against Ratcliffe, and that he was acting on the Woodvilles’ behalf. It was almost as though Ratcliffe had engineered the security breach in order to discredit Hastings, blame for which would be laid unequivocally at his door. In the robustness of the Calais council’s response, there was more than a hint of the bad blood between Hastings, Anthony Woodville and Dorset. And when the case was quickly referred to a high-profile panel at Westminster – Hastings’ informer John Edwards was hustled in front of the king and a group of his close councillors including Morton, Montgomery and the ever-reliable earl of Essex – there was a sense that Edward was moving to smooth over this growing friction between three of his leading subjects before it got out of hand.8
In the hearing that followed, Edwards retracted his original allegations with emphatic speed. He claimed that he been coerced into making the story up ‘of his own false imagination’, and threatened with ‘the brake’, the rack, unless he complied. He had made the allegations ‘for fear of his life’: they were, he confessed, a pack of lies, ‘utterly false and untrue’.9 If true, Edwards’ tale painted a picture of factionalism that had taken root at Calais: that Hastings or his supporters were trying to concoct smears against the Woodvilles and those close to them, to paint them as unreliable, disloyal and a threat to national security. In Westminster, through the king’s swift and independent arbitration, the matter was shut down, Anthony Woodville and Dorset officially exonerated.
Yet such accusations were not washed away quite so easily, as the queen’s family knew all too well. Back in 1469, allegations of witchcraft against Elizabeth and her mother had stuck, to near-catastrophic effect. For the Woodvilles, the nerve endings were still raw. Later that autumn Anthony Woodville, ever-sensitive to public opinion, wrote to his attorney general, the Middle Temple lawyer Andrew Dymmock, enclosing the text of Edwards’ confession to the king’s council. He instructed Dymmock to make more copies for circulation, together with a protestation of innocence on behalf of himself and ‘my lord marquis’, which was to be ‘made up in as sure form as can be’.10 If Woodville and Dorset had been cleared, the allegations of treason had done their work. Though Edward had interposed his intimidating form between his noblemen, the Woodvilles’ quarrel with Hastings bubbled on.
After a leisurely few weeks on pilgrimage to the north Norfolk shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, Edward returned to London. By mid-October he was at the Tower, closeted away with his close councillors, discussing international affairs. Since the summer, the sclerosis had deepened. Edward’s baleful attitude towards Scotland, carefully nurtured by Richard, now manifested itself in his demand for the repayment of his daughter Cecily’s dowry. With it, Edward stamped out any lingering hopes of her marriage to the Scottish heir, once the hoped-for foundation of a new peace between the two kingdoms.11 Across the Channel, Edward also continued to do nothing, ignoring Maximilian’s frantic pleas for English military aid, pocketing his French pension and waiting for Louis XI to die. Even a desperately ill Louis, however, was capable of mischief. That autumn, he published the secret treaty agreed with Edward the previous spring. In the great cities of Flanders there was horror. Constitutionally disinclined to war, they had always resisted Maximilian’s military ambitions. Now, with Louis’ treaty proof positive that their English ally was prepared to abandon them at the drop of a hat, they clamoured for Maximilian to come to terms with the French king.12
To add to the general muddiness, there emerged from Edward’s council meetings yet another vague notion of military action against France, the king ordering Hastings, Anthony Woodville and Dorset to form a working party to explore various options.13 Perhaps it was nothing more than an attempt by Edward – as always, invoking the idea of a French war in order to resolve domestic dissent – to corral his bickering nobles into some kind of unity. That, and the time-honoured excuse to raise cash.
Late that autumn, Edward invited the new mayor of London, William Heryot, the city’s aldermen and a number of carefully vetted citizens to hunt with him in Waltham Forest. A prosperous merchant, Heryot had a track record of showing ‘pleasures to the king’. A notable donor to the regime, he had partnered with Edward on various business initiatives: Edward was keen that his willing attitude should rub off on his fellow Londoners. After shooting the king’s deer in the company of a number of household knights, the assembled Londoners were brought to a newly built hunting lodge, where they were wined and dined, working their way through ‘all manner of dainties’ washed down by a variety of Gascon wines from the king’s cellar. During the feast Hastings made cheery table talk on Edward’s orders; following the meal, the Londoners were privileged with a sodden afternoon’s hunting in the company of the king himself. Typically, too, the king remembered the absent ladies: in the days following, gifts of venison and a tun of Gascon wine arrived for the wives of the city’s notables.14
Here was the king in his element: a nod and smile here, a ‘good word’ there, his intimacy edged with calculation. This was the corporate environment in which Edward had always thrived, and which had come to encapsulate the character of his reign. Content to get, spend and consume, luxuriating in his own charismatic majesty, Edward’s rule combined bonhomie, greed, rapacity and – through the haze of his excesses – a narrow-eyed watchfulness, alert to financial irregularities and wandering loyalties alike. Not that anybody contemplated disloyalty – at least, not in public. Under the practised charm, the threat of a terrifying, indiscriminate violence lay ready to erupt against anybody who crossed the interests of the king or his family. This was what Edward’s rule had come to – and, for some, especially its beneficiaries, these blurred, limited horizons were enough. England was at peace, with itself and with its neighbours, ruled by a solvent and more or less functioning king. If that meant a country held tight in the grip of the royal family and an autocratic monarch who, all ambition spent, seemed content to let his kingship spool out in an endless round of self-pleasure and the empty repetitions of a worn-out foreign policy, so be it.
Christmas that year, at Westminster, seemed to one onlooker even more extravagant than usual, a display of opulence befitting a ‘mighty kingdom’. The preparations had involved an extensive renovation of various ‘ruinous buildings’, a new privy kitchen, and the installation of a new great chamber in Queen Elizabeth’s apartment complex, no expense spared.15 The palace was ‘filled with riches’: cupboards adorned with the contents of Edward’s jewelhouse on public display, glinting richly in the candlelight; tapestry-lined walls, including the king’s latest acquisition, a vast multi-piece arras depicting the history of Thebes, newly imported from Flanders for the princely sum of £300; cellars fully stocked with wine. Enjoying the festive hospitality was an international guest list including ‘men from every nation’, underscoring England’s place at the centre of world events.
At the heart of the festivities was, of course, the family. On show was the dynasty’s future, Edward and Elizabeth’s ‘handsome and delightful’ children. Foremost among them were the two princes – Edward, recently turned twelve, a confident boy whose sophisticated education enhanced his natural authority; and his nine-year-old brother Richard – together with their older sister, the blonde, beautiful sixteen-year-old Elizabeth, and the king’s bastard son Arthur Plantagenet, a boy of ‘virtuous and lovely disposition’.16 The king, though, was not to be upstaged.
Always sensitive to the latest fashions, that season Edward appeared in public in a succession of the ‘costliest clothes’, in head-turning style: the robes with full sleeves, styled after the ‘monastic frock’, their insides lined with the most luxurious of furs. This new wardrobe, declared one bystander, had a sensational impact, the king displayed ‘like a new and incomparable spectacle’ – though, he added, the king naturally ‘always stood out because of his elegant figure’.17
It was this last observation that gave the game away. Edward’s habit of showing himself off in lingering public displays and walkabouts had turned into a distorted self-parody. He seemed oblivious to the extent to which his ‘fine stature’ had become bloated with years of gorging; oblivious, too, to the fact that onlookers praising his regal appearance did so with tongue firmly in cheek.18 In the last days of December, though, came a hammer-blow against which Edward’s self-love was no protection at all.
On 23 December 1482 in the city of Arras, Louis XI and Maximilian finally came face to face: Louis ill and frail, the youthful Maximilian exuding barely disguised frustration. Sick of the Burgundian duke’s inability to offer any kind of governance in war-torn Flanders, the Flemish cities of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres had taken matters into their own hands, negotiating a peace with the French king. That day, Louis and a reluctant Maximilian put their signatures to a peace treaty in which ‘all rancors, hatreds and malevolences’ between the two warring princes were to be forgiven. At the treaty’s heart was a marriage between Maximilian’s two-year-old daughter Margaret and Louis XI’s son and heir Charles – the boy who had been previously, and in Louis’ case unwillingly, promised to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth. In wording that dripped with condescension, it was Louis’ ‘pleasure’ that the king of England be included in the new agreement. This was window dressing. Edward had had no involvement in the treaty at all. He had been blindsided.19
Edward shouldn’t have been surprised. For years, his envoys and advisers had been telling him that Louis was using every trick in the book to entice Burgundy away from an alliance with England. But in playing Louis and Maximilian off against one another, Edward had characteristically convinced himself of his own desirability, that both princes needed him more than he needed them. Increasingly, though, Edward’s foreign policy vacillations had become the projections of his own inner turmoil – and, perhaps, his inability both to relinquish the idea of an aggressive, conquering England and to put that idea into practice. Edward had effectively been negotiating not with his neighbours but with himself. Now, reality had intruded. As the light poured in, it dawned on Edward that, in the great game of international power politics, he had been spun along by Louis – the king on whose imminent demise he had been relying – and, finally, snared in his web.
Edward’s once-special relationship with Burgundy was in tatters. To add insult to injury, two of the noblemen on the pro-French regency council of Burgundy, now mandated to govern the principality, were the sons of Edward’s old ally Louis of Gruuthuse, and the Bastard of Burgundy, whose joust against Anthony Woodville some fifteen years previously had appeared to herald a new dawn in Anglo-Burgundian relations.20 Ripped apart too was the French marriage alliance over which Edward had obsessed, that of his daughter Elizabeth to the dauphin. His brusque rejection of the Scottish marriage now looked horribly premature, especially as James III had refused to return his dowry. Worse still, the taps of Edward’s French pension had now been firmly and conclusively turned off. Humiliated on the international stage, his dynastic plans in shreds, Edward was ‘deeply troubled and grieved’, a grief quickly transmuted into a vicious, vindictive rage.21
That January, as Parliament opened in a wintry Westminster, a small printed pamphlet was doing the rounds. Called ‘The Promise of Matrimony’, it had come from the press of a Flemish printer named William de Machlinia. From Mechelin – or, in its French iteration Malines, the adoptive home town of Edward IV’s bibliophile sister Margaret – Machlinia had set up shop on Fleet Street near the inns of court, specializing in the printing of lawbooks. Although a legal document, ‘The Promise of Matrimony’ was far removed from his typical output. It stitched together two contracts. First was the nuptial agreement – the so-called ‘Promise’ of the title – signed by Edward and Louis at Picquigny back in 1475; the second was a recently obtained copy of the Treaty of Arras, in which Louis, so the English narrative went, had broken the marriage contract behind Edward’s back. Combined, they amounted to a damning portrayal of French perfidy: a simple and powerful piece of rhetoric clearly intended to whip up anti-French antagonism and win support for a new round of parliamentary taxation for a war against France. Back in 1472 Edward’s then chancellor, John Fortescue, had done something similar in conjunction with the manuscript copyshops of Paternoster Row. This time, Edward – or rather, his chancellor John Russell, a man with a deep appreciation of the printed word – had enlisted the power of new technology to create the first known piece of printed political propaganda in English.22
As usual, Edward had done everything to ensure a complaisant Parliament. The house of Commons was stuffed with MPs loyal to the regime’s key figures. Anthony Woodville, writing to his attorney-general Andrew Dymmock, had urged him to fix parliamentary seats for five of his own retainers and advised him to ‘get yourself one’ into the bargain. In addition, the speaker, John Wood, a veteran Exchequer official, was a royal servant steeped in financial knowhow.23
In a regal harangue Edward revealed to the Commons ‘the whole series’ of Louis XI’s ‘great frauds’, perhaps brandishing Machlinia’s pamphlet as he did so, and asked them to help him ‘take vengeance’ on France. The tactic worked: a tax was duly voted – along with a tax on wealthy foreigners, which always played well.
War, though, was a chimera, and everybody knew it. For all his fury, there was no chance of Edward mounting another invasion of France. As had been abundantly clear in his failed campaign of eight years before, the resources needed were so substantial, the preparation so complex, that even the most generous parliamentary tax wouldn’t cover it – and this time, Parliament hadn’t been particularly generous. Given his track record, Edward didn’t dare ask for more. As he put it lamely to Parliament, vengeance on France was to be exacted ‘as often as opportunities of time and circumstance might permit’: hardly a ringing declaration of war.
In an effort to underscore the regime’s martial credentials, Edward put on parliamentary record his gratitude to his ‘entirely beloved brother’ Richard for having secured a foothold in the Scottish borderlands, which Richard now aimed ‘to get and subdue’ in future’.24 In the wreckage of the king’s foreign policy, Richard’s modest achievements of the previous summer took on an added lustre. Edward seized desperately at his brother’s triumphs, and at the possibility of further conquest: days before Parliament’s opening, envoys from the Scottish pretender Albany had arrived in London, announcing his fresh defection to England. In order to support Richard in his ambitions of Scottish conquest, Edward now handed him an astonishing grant – one that, he told Parliament, had recently been agreed in talks with his brother.
First, he conferred on Richard the hereditary wardenship of the West March – the western borderlands with Scotland – along with a large portfolio of estates in the region. This was a prelude to the main event: the creation for Richard of a new county palatine, over which Richard and his heirs would have exclusive and perpetual jurisdiction. While it wasn’t everything it looked at first glance – the county, which consisted of all the land Richard could annex for himself and the English crown in the western Scottish borderlands, as yet only existed on the parchment roll of parliamentary record – it nevertheless confirmed Richard’s unprecedented domination of England’s north. No English nobleman since the Norman Conquest had possessed the power that Edward now placed in Richard’s hands.25
All of which was consistent with Edward’s ‘family first’ strategy of placing as much power as possible in the hands of those ‘high in the king’s blood’ – for it was they who bore the primary responsibility for ‘the great security, honour, defence and politic governance’ of the kingdom. Where the policy had failed spectacularly with Clarence, Richard was proof positive of its success. Consistently alive to the king’s ‘good pleasures and commandments’, Richard had reaped dazzling reward.26
That February, a new sumptuary law underscored Edward’s familial vision. The wearing of cloth-of-gold and purple silk was restricted to the king and queen, the king’s mother Cecily duchess of York, his children and his brothers and sisters. Nobody else, ‘of what estate, degree or condition he be’, however exalted in rank, could wear these luxurious fabrics. For Edward there was the family, then a vast gulf and then the rest of the nobility. All this was now evident in parliamentary legislation that represented the latest stage of Edward’s familial carve-up of his kingdom. In Wales and the Marches, where his firstborn son’s household and council – dominated by the queen’s family – held sway, William Herbert, son of Edward’s Welsh ‘master-lock’, was formally removed from the principality that his father had once dominated on the king’s behalf. Even those in the king’s favour suffered, Parliament ratifying the most egregious land grab of recent years: the transferral of the vast estates of the duke of Norfolk to Edward’s second son, whose little child-wife Anne Mowbray, heiress to the dukedom, had died two years earlier. Now, instead of reverting to their original heirs, the lands became the property of Edward’s son – again falling under the control of his mother’s Woodville family, in whose care he was – and, should he die childless, the crown. Prominent among those who lost out was the Norfolk knight John Howard. Over the years, Howard’s loyalty to the regime had been constant. But in this case, at any rate, it went unrewarded. As far as the king was concerned, family came first. Like Herbert, Howard had no option but to put up with it. 27
As the days lengthened, Edward’s fury subsided into one of the bouts of listlessness, ‘sadness’, with which those close to him had become all too familiar. Physicians and leading councillors alike were concerned about the ‘pensivous thoughts’, the ‘greatest melancholy’ in which Edward was now submerged. If the king’s bingeing and promiscuity formed the underlying cause, they opined, Louis XI’s ‘crafty and fraudulent dealing’ had been the trigger. But it wasn’t just Edward’s mind that refused to function. His body had had enough.28
On Tuesday 25 March, in Holy Week, Edward made the journey from Windsor downstream to Westminster. There over Easter he fell ill and was closeted away in his privy chamber, unable to move, let alone get out of bed, despite the allure of the great feasting going on elsewhere in the palace.29 Opinion varied as to the diagnosis. One commentator heard that he had gone fishing and had come back with a chill, which had become complicated; another suggested that the malaria Edward picked up on his French campaign had returned with a vengeance. Amid general medical ignorance – Edward, physicians pronounced with authority, ‘was not affected by any known type of disease’ – rumours of poison abounded. Perhaps the most convincing explanation came from Philippe de Commynes away in France. Having already seen his master Louis XI survive an apoplexy, Commynes suggested that the same thing had now happened to Edward, his massive consumption of alcohol and hypertension-inducing lifestyle now catching up with him in one massive cerebral haemorrhage.30
In the fevered, speculative atmosphere at court the king’s death was reported prematurely by one twitchy agent in the pay of his brother Richard. Carried fast up the Great North Road, news reached York on 6 April. A hastily arranged funeral mass in the Minster the following day was invalidated with equal haste after it turned out the king was still alive.
Over the next days Edward carried on, prone and immobile but apparently lucid. Surrounded by his coterie of helpless doctors, servants padding silently around his chamber, the bedridden king started to prepare for the death whose approach he had already started to discern. In consultation with the executors – men like John Morton and Thomas Rotherham – who now hovered at his bedside, Edward reviewed the will and testament that he had drawn up back in 1475 before his abortive invasion of France, adding codicils here and there.31 As he put the kingdom in readiness to hand on to his twelve-year-old son, one issue above all gnawed at Edward’s mind: the messy squabbles between certain of his lords, whose control would be rather more tricky for a king on the verge of adolescence, however fine his political education.
The vendetta most urgently in need of resolution was that between his closest friend Hastings and the queen’s family. Anthony Woodville was away in Ludlow with Prince Edward, so it was Dorset who, along with Hastings, was ushered into the presence of the dying king, his bulk propped up on a mound of pillows. As they stood at his bedside Edward weakly urged them to reconcile for the sake of his sons; then, finding the effort too much, lay down on his right side and gazed up expectantly at the two lords. Moved by the sight of their ailing king, Hastings and Dorset told Edward what he wanted to hear, tearfully clasping hands with each other in mutual forgiveness and reconciliation. Perhaps, at that moment, they convinced themselves they meant it.32
Two days later, in the early hours of Wednesday 9 April, Edward died. He was a few weeks short of his forty-first birthday. In the glimmering rushlight, air thick with incense, his close servants wept by his bedside. At its head was the confessor to whom the dying king had made his remorseful last confession, promising, desperately, to make amends for any financial wrongs done and debts owed before he was summoned to God to make his own final accounting. He had, remarked an anonymous member of his government, made ‘the best of ends for a worldly prince’ – although, as the same chronicler drily put it, it helped that Edward was ‘carried off immediately’ before he could change his mind. Then the deferential tone was resumed: the late king had, he concluded, put his affairs in order impeccably, and had made ‘full and wise’ arrangements for the succession.
Yet Edward’s end had come suddenly. It had caught many by surprise and left England with a young monarch who, while widely acknowledged to be kingly material, was not yet of age. The question now, as the late king’s confessor bent over his body, fingers sliding eyelids over his sightless gaze, was how to put those arrangements into practice.33 And, as Edward’s corpse began to stiffen, people’s thoughts began to turn towards the new dispensation, and their place in it.
It was still dark when people started to slip out of Westminster with news of Edward’s death. In the depths of the palace, Queen Elizabeth summoned her dead husband’s councillors to discuss next steps. Two were sent to the mayor of London, with orders for him to review the city’s security arrangements in light of the king’s unexpected demise; and messengers were dispatched to Ludlow, to tell Prince Edward that his father was dead and that he was now Edward V, king of England. As bells tolled across Westminster and London, a stream of agents left court carrying the news to nobles and gentry across the country: to Richard, at his Middleham base; and to Hastings’ garrison at Calais.34
Later that morning Edward’s washed, anointed body, massively naked except for a cloth from his navel to his knees, was placed on a board in Westminster Hall. For some ten hours people filed past, witnessing the fact of his death: members of the late king’s household, lords who happened to be ‘in London or near about’, the mayor of London Sir Edmund Shaw and other city dignitaries. That evening the body was taken away, eviscerated and embalmed with spices, wrapped in fine linen bound with silk cords, then in layers of silk, velvet and cloth-of-gold. Next morning, the coffined corpse was carried into St Stephen’s Chapel, which was draped in black, and placed on a hearse illuminated by thousands of candles. Over the next eight days there unfolded an elaborate sequence of divine offices for the dead sung by the chapel royal, intercessions for the late king’s soul; by night, selected lords and members of Edward’s household, their names drawn up on a watch roll, kept vigil over his body. As they watched, in another part of the palace the royal council, in its customary role as caretaker government, deliberated the transference of power from the old regime to the new.35
There were some key absences. Most significant were those of the new king’s two uncles: Anthony Woodville, at Ludlow with the king himself; and Richard, still in the north. Also missing were great magnates like the earl of Northumberland and the duke of Buckingham, away on his Gloucestershire estates. Yet around the council table sat a group of experienced royal councillors, loyal to the wishes of the late king whom they had served, and now to his son and heir. Alongside the likes of Edward’s chancellor Thomas Rotherham and John Morton, both of whom had been involved in the recent additions to the royal will, sat William Hastings and John Howard, John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln and the young heir to the duke of Suffolk, and household men like Sir Thomas Montgomery and Edward’s brother-in-law Thomas St Leger. Prominent too were members of the queen’s family, chief among them the marquis of Dorset and, at the head of the table, Elizabeth Woodville herself. Behind her regal poise she was still absorbing the shock of her husband’s death and her new role, at the age of forty-six, as mother to the king of England.36
Among the councillors there was, in the words of one anonymous commentator – a man then present in the palace, if not in the council chamber itself – complete consensus about what should happen next. ‘All who were present keenly desired that this prince should succeed his father in all his glory.’ In other words, Edward’s young son and heir should be crowned and should rule in person. This keenness was manifest in the early date agreed for his coronation: 4 May, barely three and a half weeks away.
On the face of it, the crowning of a twelve-year-old might have seemed unusual. But to a council packed with men steeped in legal and historical precedent, and with sharp memories of the dynastic upheavals of recent decades, it was an obvious step. While Prince Edward was a minor, he was by all accounts an intelligent and active boy, who would provide the ideal focus for his subjects’ loyalties. Besides which, there were precedents. The great Edward III had ascended the throne at fourteen, while – an admittedly less auspicious example – Richard II had been crowned at the age of ten. In his will, Edward IV had underscored his desire for continuity: what more continuous than for government to continue seamlessly under his son? Here was a rare chance to effect a smooth handover of power, one in which everything might, more or less, remain the same.37
The councillors, accordingly, threw their collective weight behind the new king. But, as everybody knew, just because the king was crowned did not mean that he would begin to rule. His majority, indeed, was four years away. In such situations, the precedent of previous royal minorities suggested that a governing council should rule in the boy’s name, until he was able to do so himself. Here, too, the arrangement seemed to make sense. But, as the council got down to business, its fleeting unanimity began to buckle and splinter over the role of the queen’s family in the new regime.
The problems started with the provision for the new king’s continued upbringing, his ‘government’ or ‘tuition’. His current governor, who had supervised his education for the last decade, was his maternal uncle Anthony Woodville – and indeed, Woodville’s authority over the young boy had been reconfirmed only weeks before by Edward IV. This authority, however, applied to the boy as prince of Wales, not as king. When it was proposed that existing arrangements continue, and that the boy be placed in the custody of his mother’s Woodville family, trenchant objections were raised by a knot of council members. There was no way, they stated emphatically, that the young king should be given into the care of the ‘uncles and brothers on the mother’s side’. Members of the queen’s family, indeed, ‘should be absolutely forbidden to have control of the person of the young man until he came of age’.38
There was a trace of moral concern in these objections. It was one thing for the Woodville ‘uncles and brothers’ – Dorset and Sir Edward Woodville to the fore – to have been the ringleaders in Edward IV’s life of vice and dissipation; quite another for them to have the rule of his twelve-year-old son. But what concerned the council most of all was to balance conflicting political interests: interests that, in the absence of the late king’s massive centripetal force, threatened to destabilize the government. While Edward was alive, the ‘queen’s blood’ were part of the extended royal family. Now, with Edward’s vast shadow removed, they were exposed in plain sight as a discrete political bloc. Suddenly, Anthony Woodville’s reinforced ‘authority’ over the prince, and his power to raise men in the Welsh Marches, combined with Dorset’s control over the Tower and the royal treasury, assumed – at least for some on the council – an actively menacing valence, as though Woodville custody of the prince threatened to transmute into Woodville control of the kingdom.39 For those old enough to remember the council’s unavailing attempts to control the virulent factionalism of the 1450s, it was essential to avoid a repeat. Unity was vital.
Quickly, these concerns focused on the upcoming coronation. It would, certain councillors stated, be difficult to preserve a status quo among the lords ‘if those of the queen’s relatives who were most influential with the prince’ – Anthony Woodville and Sir Richard Grey – were allowed to escort the new king to London ‘with an immoderate number of horse’.40 Nobody wanted noblemen and their private armies facing off in London’s streets for control of the boy. The most vocal advocate for restricting the size of the king’s escort, and for the reining in of Woodville influence more generally, was William Hastings. And while Hastings’ views may have been ‘sound’, as the anonymous commentator put it, he had more pressing reasons than most to hold them.
Days before, Hastings and Dorset had shaken hands over the body of their dying king. As far as Hastings was concerned, the reconciliation was purely cosmetic. The Woodvilles’ position now had worrying implications for his own: should they get their hands on ‘supreme power’, they would ‘sharply avenge’ the injuries he had done them. While the extent of this bad blood was unclear, it was unsurprising that Hastings should feel exposed. All his wealth and power derived from the late king, with whom he could ‘do anything’, in whose all-enveloping shelter he had spent the last quarter-century and alongside whom, in his will, he had stipulated that he should be buried. But Edward was now gone – and, as Hastings knew perfectly well, changes of regime tended to be accompanied by wide-ranging reshuffles, in which the new king’s household men took the places and offices of the old. In this case, Edward V’s establishment was currently ruled by the queen’s family, which had a deep-rooted animus against Hastings.41
Hastings’ anxiety gave force to his protestations. If the new king did not come with a ‘modest force’, he stated flatly, he would ‘flee’ to Calais and await developments there. Nobody present needed reminding of the significance of Hastings’ threat to retreat to a base that had been the springboard for Edward’s own march on London in 1460, and Warwick and Clarence’s rebellion nine years later; a base which, given the continued insecurity on the Franco-Burgundian border, was currently bristling with some fifteen hundred troops, more than double its usual strength.42
Queen Elizabeth was quick to conciliate. Keen to ‘extinguish every spark’ of antagonism, she assured Hastings that she would write to her son the king, recommending he bring with him no more than two thousand men. With this gesture, Elizabeth acknowledged the council’s concerns about balance and showed that her family, too, wanted unity. After all, it was to the Woodvilles’ advantage for arrangements regarding control of the young king to stay precisely as they were. Given this, reducing the size of the king’s retinue was an easy concession to make. Hastings pronounced himself happy. He was sure that Richard and the duke of Buckingham, men in whom he had ‘the greatest trust’, would bring with them similar numbers.43 Balance would be preserved.
On 14 April, five days after leaving Westminster, a royal messenger dismounted at Ludlow Castle, and news of the ‘lamentable and most sorrowful tidings’ of his father’s death was broken to Prince Edward. Updates on the council’s deliberations followed soon after. Within two days the prince, comforted in his ‘sorrow and pensiveness’ by his uncle and governor Anthony Woodville, was echoing the council’s resolution. In a letter to the town of Lynn on the north Norfolk coast – a letter almost certainly penned for him by Woodville, whose town it was – the boy proclaimed his intention to ‘govern, rule and protect this our realm of England’, and to be ‘crowned at Westminster’.44
Word of Edward IV’s death had already reached Richard at Middleham, on the other side of the country. Since the first rumours of his brother’s demise, Richard had probably been anticipating news – but, in any case, he had his ear to the ground. His lines of communication with London and the southeast were exceptional: the previous summer, the system of posts put in place to ensure rapid communication between him and Edward during his invasion of Scotland had brought news to the king of Berwick’s surrender – a distance of some 340 miles – in an astonishing thirty-six hours.45 Now, in the days following his brother’s death, a constant stream of messengers shuttled between Westminster and north Yorkshire with news of discussions in the council chamber. Many of these agents, according to ‘common report’, were from Hastings. As Richard assembled the retinues that would accompany him south to his nephew’s coronation, he digested the council’s discussions, filtered for him through Hastings’ uneasy perspective on events.
Edward IV’s final journey started on the evening of Wednesday 16 April. Following mass in Westminster Abbey, his coffin was heaved onto a carriage draped in black velvet and, over the coffin, a black pall with a cross picked out in white cloth-of-gold. Atop it was a life-size effigy, ‘like to the similitude of the king’, dressed in his royal robes and crown, orb and sceptre clutched in its stiff hands. Drawn by six black-caparisoned coursers, and protected by a canopy of imperial purple borne by four of the late king’s household knights, the solemn cavalcade set off up King Street towards Charing Cross, a company of banner-bearing knights and squires headed by John Howard, themselves led by a gaggle of heralds and bishops. After overnighting at Syon monastery, the procession halted the following day at Eton; there, bishops John Russell and John Morton censed the coffined body, bathing it in drifts of incense as the college’s assembled students knelt murmuring prayers, white-surpliced, bare-headed, tapers in one hand and psalters in the other. Then the procession moved on, crossing the Thames at Windsor Bridge and towards the castle with its great drum keep.46
In the castle’s lower ward stood Edward’s new chapel of St George, a half-realized vision in perpendicular Gothic. His coffin was borne up the nave, whose lower walls had begun to rise from their foundations, and into the choir, in a more advanced stage of completion: its pendant vaulting soaring overhead, windows glazed and carved stalls in place, walls and floor lined with black cloth. At the north-eastern end, ready to receive the body, was the newly finished ‘sepulture’ and, above it, the chantry chapel where masses would be sung in perpetuity for the dead king’s soul. Dominating the choir was a massive wooden hearse, a multi-storey wooden stage, ‘marvellous well wrought’, festooned with banners, flags and escutcheons, in which the coffin was placed. That night, after the Office of the Dead had been sung, a ‘great watch’ was kept over the body by lords, knights, squires and yeomen of the late king’s chamber and household.47
Inside the candlelit hearse stood a group of lords, among them Hastings and Dorset, uncomfortably close, Edward’s household steward Lord Stanley, and John Howard. The rest, hooded and in mourning black, stood in concentric circles radiating outward from the hearse: from the late king’s brother-in-law Thomas St Leger and his giant master of horse John Cheyne; to the Oxfordshire knight Sir William Stonor and the gentleman usher William Collingbourne. Throughout the night they remained shoulder to shoulder, constant and motionless, their shrouded faces illuminated by the burning brands they held, the last collective expression of a household’s unswerving loyalty to the king they had served.48
The next morning the final rites began, commendations of the departed soul followed by masses and offerings. Edward’s richly embroidered coat of arms, shield and crowned helmet were all offered up to his former chancellor Thomas Rotherham in his capacity as archbishop of York. Then, through the doors in the temporary west wall, came John Cheyne leading a warhorse in black trappings; riding it was Sir William Parr, bareheaded and in white armour, gripping a battleaxe point downwards. Riding the length of the choir, Parr dismounted and, led by the heralds of the absent Richard and the duke of Buckingham, made his way to the high altar, offering himself to God.
The solemn ritual was punctuated by an unseemly scuffle between the two offerors, lords Berkeley and Maltravers, as to who should stand on the favoured right side. Berkeley lost out, his claims of senior rank trumped by Maltravers’ lineage. Along with John Howard, Berkeley was one of those who, due to benefit from the death of the old duke of Norfolk, had been passed over when Edward IV settled the duke’s entire inheritance on his second son, Richard. Having kept his head down while Edward was alive, Berkeley was now flexing his muscles. While his spat with Maltravers was brief and quickly resolved, it was a sign that, with Edward not yet in the grave, the political order was already loosening.49
The mass ended, offerings of cloth-of-gold were laid on Edward’s coffin. One herald, vainly trying to scribble the offerors’ order of precedence as he peered over the packed crowds, managed to note that the last to offer – first in ‘nearness of blood’ to the late king, was Edward’s teenage nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, who, in the absence of the dead king’s brother Richard, was designated chief mourner.50
Finally, with the great officers of Edward’s household gathered round the open grave, the coffin was lowered into the ground. Together, Hastings, Stanley, the treasurer Sir John Elrington and Sir William Parr, all weeping openly, snapped their staves of office and threw them into the grave, after their king. One herald, a Portuguese named Roger Machado, glossed the self-evident symbolism. They were now, he said, ‘men without a master and without office’.
It was a sentiment echoed in one of the many verse epitaphs and laments for the king’s soul that, painted on placards and boards, hung around his tomb: a poem that came from the heart of Edward’s household, told in the voice of one of the servants left bereft by his passing. This was a narrator struggling to deal with the shock of the king’s death: he ‘was here yesterday’, went the uncomprehending refrain. For him, Edward was the peerless war-leader, the wellspring of knighthood, the ‘freshest’ in battle, the ‘most dread’ prince whose deeds were immortalized ‘in gests, in romances, in chronicles near and far’. In his eyes, even Edward’s debacle in France eight years before had acquired the lustre of an epic enterprise, the French miraculously subdued both by ‘force and might’ yet ‘without stroke’. Edward, too, had made Scotland ‘yield’ – almost, it seemed, in person. This, though, was no sycophant. Rather, it was the hard, unyielding loyalty of the household retainer: a man who had followed his king willingly into battle and who had seen him ‘in every field, full ready for our right’, whose identity and cause were inseparable from those of his king. For him Edward, magnificent in his robes of estate, was an affirmation of his own place in the world: indeed, ‘it was a world to see him ride about’. He was the ‘sun, the rose, the sunbeam’ – never had Edward’s badges seemed more apt – and his ‘royal company’, his household men, bathed in his lustre. The king’s household was this author’s universe: his mind’s eye recollected Edward’s retinues, ‘his lords, his knights all’, his ‘palaces made of lime and stone’ and his household servants dining together, breaking bread in the hall. Then, suddenly, that constant, glorious light had been snuffed out.
Now, a desolate present stretched before the narrator. In the Westminster streets, Edward’s weeping, black-clad retinue shuffled towards him – mere ‘wretches’ now, deprived of ‘the lantern and the light’. Coming to terms with this barren, insecure new reality, he choked, ‘makes my heart quake’.51
What now could loyal followers of Edward IV do? For the poet, the answer was simple: there was ‘no choice, no other grace’ than to be faithful to the memory of their dead master, to death. But for the late king’s servants, as they accompanied Edward’s coffin to its last resting place at Windsor and stood vigilant together through the night, the pressing question was what form that fidelity might take. After all, masterless in this insecure new world, they needed to find a new light to follow. This was no literary conceit. Back in 1461, after the death of Charles VII of France, his former chamberlain summed up perfectly this reactive compound of loyalty and self-interest. Addressing the late king’s household, he told them that he ‘and all other servants had lost a master’. And, he continued, with brutal clarity, ‘every man must think for himself, and each one should provide for himself.’52
Now, in that spring of 1483, Edward’s servants were thinking along much the same lines. Nobody more so than the man whose perspective adhered most closely to that of the devastated, lamenting poet, and who perhaps gave a similar speech to the late king’s household: his own chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings.
On Saturday 19 April, the day after Edward’s last rites, as London’s mayor and aldermen met to discuss their reception of the new king, the council convened again. In the meantime, two letters had arrived from Richard. The first – warm, comforting, ‘loving’ – was written to Queen Elizabeth Woodville herself. Consoling her in her loss, Richard assured her that he would offer ‘submission, fealty, and all that was due from him to his lord and king, Edward V, the first-born son of his brother the dead king, and queen’. The second letter, a precise edge to its courtesy, was addressed to the council.
Apprised of the council’s deliberations, Richard set out his own position clearly. Drawing attention to his record of unimpeachable loyalty to his brother the late king, ‘at home and abroad, in peace and war’, he pledged an equal loyalty to the new king, and indeed all his brother’s offspring if – ‘God forbid’ – the youth should die. He would lay his life on the line to protect the children from danger. Then, he came to the crunch.
Richard asked the councillors, as they made their plans for the new government, to bear in mind his own ‘deserts’. He was, he stated, entitled to the government of the kingdom: both by law and as set out in his brother’s will. Asking that the councillors consider his record of service and what was best for the country, he ended with an emphatic reiteration: ‘nothing contrary to law and his brother’s desire’, he told the council, ‘could be decreed without harm’.53 While Richard’s request was open-ended, everybody knew what he meant. He wanted to be protector.
Richard’s demand had the council scrambling for historical precedent. The previous century was littered with useful examples of ‘protectors’, from Humphrey duke of Gloucester’s rule during the long minority of his nephew Henry VI to Richard duke of York’s two protectorates during the adult Henry’s incapacitating bouts of mental illness in the 1450s. None, however, adumbrated what Richard now had in mind.
Over the previous hundred years or so, when councils tried to establish a working government in the absence of a sane or adult monarch, they had always come back to the same problem. If you appointed a protector of the realm, usually the foremost nobleman of royal blood, you risked handing that nobleman quasi-regal authority. Such powers were temptingly open to abuse: indeed, back in 1377, Richard II’s uncle John of Gaunt was forced to issue a public denial to Parliament that he wanted the throne for himself.54 Consequently, councils had always resisted demands for a full regency, in which royal powers were conferred on a proxy king. More than that, they had always split the role of protector in two. Nobody, however close to the king by blood, was allowed to hold the post of ‘tutela’ – tutor or governor of the king – and ‘defensor’, defender of the realm. Back in 1428, when Henry VI’s uncle Humphrey of Gloucester had lobbied incessantly to be given the care of the young king, the council was unmoving: in handing him the title of ‘protector’, they clarified that it was explicitly not ‘the name of tutor, lieutenant, governor, nor of regent, nor no name that should import authority of governance of the land’. Protector, here, was simply another term for ‘chief councillor’, with special responsibility for the kingdom’s security – a sop to Humphrey’s sense of his own dignity rather than anything else. During Henry VI’s periods of insanity, Richard of York was handed precisely the same powers as Humphrey: powers which York swore not to use without the council’s backing.55
Yet this combined governance – protectorship of the realm and custody of the king – was apparently what Richard had now requested, citing both ‘law’ and his ‘brother’s desire’. In his last will and testament Edward had, so it was said, entrusted his sons ‘to the tuition’ – the upbringing – ‘of Richard his brother’. Yet even if Edward had granted these powers on his deathbed – which, given the lack of precedent, was highly unlikely – it was academic, given that a dead king’s will had no permanent force in law. Neither did Richard’s close blood relationship with the new king carry any legal weight.56
To a council determined to preserve a delicate balance between interest groups, such precedent was a helpful prop. Nevertheless, one caucus of conciliar opinion – the same group that had protested so vigorously against the dominance of the Woodville ‘uncles and brothers’ – insisted on tabling Richard’s request. Accordingly, the council was presented with a choice. The first was that Richard head up a regency government. The second was that he be offered precisely the same role that Duke Humphrey had been given some half-century before: the role of chief councillor in a governing council that would help the new king to reign in his own right, with the honorific title of ‘protector’. The council voted ‘in a majority’ for the second option. Edward V would rule with the guidance of a council, his uncle Richard at its head.
Even now, there were voices of caution. Such decisions about the government’s composition and the coronation needed to involve Richard, the realm’s greatest magnate of royal blood: they were too important to be finalized in his absence. If Richard arrived with everything settled, especially his own role in his nephew’s government, he might receive the council’s decision ‘reluctantly’. He might, indeed, ‘upset everything’.
At which point Thomas, marquis of Dorset cut in: ‘we are so important’, he breezed, ‘that we can make and enforce these decisions, even without the king’s uncle’. On a point of procedure Dorset was right: the council did have executive power. But to some on the council, the comment dripped with contempt and impunity – and, moreover, it indicated the Woodvilles’ real agenda to arrange the government to suit themselves.
Dorset then proceeded to back up his words with deeds. The new government’s structure was ratified, and the council took immediate steps to combat French aggression, mandating Dorset to ‘keep the sea’. The queen’s youngest brother, Sir Edward Woodville, was instructed to assemble a navy and an expeditionary force of two thousand marines, for which he was given £3,670 in cash out of the royal treasury now under Dorset’s control in the Tower. A detachment of three hundred men was dispatched to reinforce the garrison at Calais: an urgent and necessary intervention for the defence of the realm, or – seen another way – an attempt to prevent the enclave’s lieutenant, Hastings, from asserting his military independence. The Woodvilles had played everything by the book. Through the council, it seemed that they were set to dominate the minority rule of Edward V.57
By this time, Richard was on his way south. At York, he stopped to hold obsequies for his brother in the Minster – a funeral service ‘full of tears’ – and to make a public commitment to the new regime. Summoning all the region’s nobility, he made them swear binding oaths of loyalty to the new king, Edward V. Richard, it was noted, led by example: he ‘swore first of all’.58 The summons also had another purpose: some of these nobles and their men would accompany Richard to London, swelling his company to the permitted two thousand men. And, as well as receiving updates from Hastings, while in York Richard received another messenger, this time from the duke of Buckingham.
Buckingham’s adult life had been an exercise in frustration. One of the greatest noblemen in the land, married to one of the queen’s sisters, he was exceptionally close to the centre of power but, under Edward, excluded from it. He had been shouldered out of his family’s traditional spheres of influence in the Welsh Marches, where the prince’s council now dominated, and the north midlands, where the lands he coveted were bestowed instead on Hastings. Buckingham’s role in the Yorkist establishment had been restricted to walk-on parts, as a glittering courtly bauble and occasional useful idiot: in his honorific role of high steward, he had rubber-stamped Clarence’s guilty verdict and death sentence. Whether or not Buckingham resented his childhood marriage to Katherine Woodville – though vocal in his ‘loathing’ for women in general, there was no sign that he detested his wife with any particular vehemence – he resented her family, who had come to represent everything that he felt had held him back.
During Buckingham’s childhood years in Edward’s household, Richard had been a regular presence at his side, the two boys appearing together in the regime’s rituals and ceremonies. The relationship appeared to have endured. Shortly after Buckingham received news of Edward’s death, he sent a trusted messenger to Richard, promising his support in this ‘new world’, and offering to attend on him with a thousand men should need arise. Richard, it was said, sent the messenger back with thanks and ‘diverse privy instructions by mouth’.
Meanwhile, both Richard and Buckingham were in touch with the new king at Ludlow. Edward V and his advisers were happy to accept Richard’s proposal of a rendezvous on the way to London, so that they, together with Buckingham, could escort the king into the city together, a picture of the new regime’s unity. While Northampton, on Watling Street, was on Richard’s route south, for the king’s retinues it represented a substantial detour through the midlands. For them, the more direct way to London was down the Thames valley, the road Edward and his Marcher men had taken after Mortimer’s Cross over twenty years before. Reflecting the prevailing spirit of compromise, however, they agreed to the meeting point.59
As a fretful Hastings waited in London, raising his own men – ‘I will and desire you’, he wrote urgently to John Paston the younger in the Pale fortress of Guisnes, ‘to come over in all goodly haste’ – Richard rode south out of York, still in mourning black, at the head of six hundred horsemen, recruiting more as he went. On the other side of the country, the young king’s household left Ludlow on 24 April; shortly after, Buckingham rode out of the west country. The three retinues would converge at Northampton on the 29th, to enable them to stick to the council’s planned date for the king’s arrival in London: May Day.60