The Demon's Brood (36 page)

When Edward returned to London he was greeted euphorically. Not only had he won a decisive victory, but he was strikingly different from the former sovereign – young, handsome, high spirited, commanding. Everybody expected reform and good government. There was a sense of renewal during his coronation
at Westminster Abbey on 29 June 1461, and when Parliament met in November it warmly confirmed his right to the throne, the Speaker even complimenting him on his ‘beauty of personage'. Henry VI was attainted as a usurper, with twelve peers and a hundred knights and squires who, whether dead or alive, became outlaws under sentence of death, losing their lands and property. Two new earls and seven new barons were created, while his brothers were made princes – George, Duke of Clarence and Richard, Duke of Gloucester – and England acquired a new royal family.

Edward knew the war was not over, as he hinted in an address to parliament when he referred to the ‘horrible murder and cruel death of my lord, my father, my brother Rutland and my cousin of Salisbury, and others'.
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The Milanese Prospero di Camulio commented, ‘Anyone who reflects at all upon the queen's wretchedness and the ruin of those killed and considers the ferocity of this country, and the victors' state of mind, should indeed, it seems to me, pray to God for the dead, and not less than the living.' The canny Milanese added, ‘grievances and recriminations will break out between King Edward and Warwick, King Henry and the queen will be victorious'.
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The new king could not feel safe, and established a widespread network of spies who regularly sent him reports. In 1462 he gave the constable, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, power to proceed in cases of treason, ‘summarily and plainly, without noise and show of judgment, on simple inspection of fact',
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which was contrary to Common Law and earned Tiptoft the name Butcher of England. In their ‘simple inspection', the council used the rack or ‘burning in the feet'.

Yet Edward also tried conciliation, pardoning the Duke of Somerset who had been Lancastrian commander at Towton, restoring his estates and even sharing a bed with him. But ‘Harry of Somerset' was the son of the duke killed at St Albans and rejoined Henry VI at Bamburgh. Warwick and his brother Lord Montague then eliminated Henry's last bastions. They did
so with enthusiasm since it involved the final destruction of their arch-enemies in the North, the Percys. Resistance came to an end in 1464 when Montague routed Somerset at Hexham, executing him immediately on Edward's express orders. In reward, Montague was made Earl of Northumberland.

Warwick dominated England, to the extent that a Frenchman joked that the country had two rulers, ‘M. de Warwick and someone whose name escapes me'.
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Even the chancellor was his brother, Archbishop George Neville of York. The earl also dictated foreign policy, and from across the Channel Louis XI set out to make friends with him, rightly suspecting that King Edward intended to renew the Hundred Years War.

But a fortnight before Hexham was fought, Edward had secretly taken a step that nearly cost him his throne.

Like Stubbs and Green, modern historians differ in their view of Edward IV, but no one denies he was colourful. With an overwhelming presence that matched his physique, he dominated everyone around him.

When his tomb was opened at Windsor in 1789, the skeleton was found to be 6 ft 3½ in tall – a fifteenth-century giant. No portrait conveys the yellow-haired, fair-skinned good looks noted by the chronicles, but Philippe de Commynes says he had never seen a more handsome prince when he first saw him in 1470. In an age when a nobleman spent a year's income on clothes, he dressed with eye-catching opulence, in cloth of gold, velvet brocades, silk damasks, in furs and the finest linen, and was covered in priceless rings, chains and hat badges.

His manner was unusually informal and friendly, ‘so genial in his greeting that when he saw a newcomer bewildered by his regal appearance and royal pomp, he would give him courage to speak, by laying a kindly hand on his shoulder', writes the Roman scholar Domenico Mancini. ‘He listened very willingly
to plaintiffs or to anyone who complained to him about some injustice – charges against himself he disarmed by an excuse even though he might not put the matter right.'
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Flatteringly, he could remember the name of every landed gentleman in the kingdom, with the name of his estate. He was equally charming to City merchants and their wives, whom he often entertained. When he asked a rich widow for a loan and she said she would give £10 he kissed her, whereupon she gave him £20.
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Although in no way an intellectual, he collected several hundred illuminated manuscripts, bought in Flanders, mainly histories or historical romances (which were more or less indistinguishable), including the chronicles of Froissart and Waurin. Apart from missals or primers, all were in French. Several English chroniclers dedicated their works to him, such as Capgrave and Harding, but there is no evidence he read them. Nor is there evidence of his patronizing the printer Caxton. He built more lavishly than any king since Edward III, adding to his favourite castles of Fotheringhay and Nottingham, but – except for the hall of Eltham Palace and St George's Chapel at Windsor, little of it has survived. As for relaxation, hunting ranked high, especially fallow buck or hares in the Thames Valley, while he enjoyed angling. A gentler side is revealed by a ‘garden of delights' at Windsor – herbs, roses and lilies.

Apart from gluttony – he purged his belly after a meal to begin all over again – Edward's main pleasure was womanizing, which eventually ruined his health. When he married, he told his mother that his bride was sure to bear him children since she had plenty already, while ‘by God's Blessed Lady I am a bachelor and have some too'.
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Mancini heard how the king behaved badly towards his conquests, whom he seduced by money or promises, passing them on to friends as soon as they bored him. He pursued ladies whether married or unmarried, high born or low, getting Lady Eleanor Butler into bed by promising her marriage, which later caused serious political trouble. Although Mancini says that he never
forced them, Vergil tells us he tried to rape one of Warwick's kinswomen under the earl's own roof. Nonetheless, he treated Queen Elizabeth with respect and was an indulgent father to his daughters. (At least one, Elizabeth, inherited his looks.)

Edward was a good friend, especially to William Hastings, a young Warwickshire squire who had fought for him with outstanding bravery at Mortimer's Cross, doing so again on more than one occasion. William became his boon companion and trusted lieutenant, rewarded by being made a peer and Lord Chamberlain. Thomas More heard that he had been ‘a loving man and passing well-beloved',
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although the queen hated Lord Hastings for encouraging and sharing in her husband's womanizing, and as an enemy of her kindred.

When at Sheen, a favourite residence, Edward liked to hear Mass in the external chapel of the charterhouse next door. He established a friary at Greenwich, also a favourite palace, for the Observant Franciscans, one of the period's few genuinely fervent orders. A cleric who knew him well comments that despite his self-indulgence he was ‘a most devout Catholic, an unsparing enemy towards all heretics, and a most loving encourager of wise and learned men, and of the clergy'. The same writer adds that the king died a sincerely religious death.
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For all his piety, Edward's uncontrollable libido brought him a most unsuitable wife. Elizabeth, Lady Grey was the widow of an impecunious Lancastrian knight mortally wounded at Towton and a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Margaret. Her father, Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, was a very minor Lancastrian peer who had married the Duke of Bedford's widow Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Twenty-six, blonde, beautiful and tough, she resisted the king's attempts to seduce her, even when he drew a dagger, saying that if she was too humble to be his queen she was too good to be his harlot.

In despair, he married Elizabeth ‘in most secret manner' early on the morning of May Day 1464 at Grafton near Stony Stratford, while supposedly hunting. The only other people at the most romantic wedding in royal history were the priest, the bride's mother, two gentlewomen and a young man to help the priest sing. Not until September did Edward reveal he had a queen – making a fool of Warwick, who had been in Paris negotiating the king's marriage to Louis XI's sister-in-law. Some of Edward's subjects were so shocked that there were rumours of witchcraft. Even so, Elizabeth was crowned at Westminster in May 1465. The Earl of Warwick did not attend the ceremony.

A grasping courtier on the make whom Warwick described contemptuously as the son of ‘but a squire',
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old Lord Rivers quickly exploited the situation. By 1466 he was treasurer of England and an earl, marrying his numerous children to the greatest catches in the country, the immensely rich Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, ‘a slip of a girl of about eighty', being forced to wed his twenty-year-old son John, in what an anonymous chronicler called ‘a diabolical marriage'. (She was only in her sixties.) Allying with new magnates such as Lord Herbert, the Wydevilles formed what was virtually a court party.

In 1467 it became clear that Edward had turned against Warwick when he dismissed his brother Archbishop Neville from his office as Lord Chancellor. He also repudiated Warwick's pro-French foreign policy. The earl did not want to revive the Hundred Years War, fearing King Louis might finance a Lancastrian revolt, but in 1468 Edward married his sister Margaret to the new Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, who was Louis's arch-enemy. Warwick realized he had lost all influence.

Humiliated at home and abroad, the ‘Kingmaker' saw the Wydevilles as the Duke of York had seen the Beauforts, convinced they meant to destroy him. He tried to regain power with
a series of political manoeuvres that came in three phases. First, he plotted to put Edward under strict control and rule through him, as York had done through Henry VI as Protector; then to replace him on the throne by his younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, who was the Yorkist heir presumptive; and finally to restore Henry.

The first phase began in July 1469 when, with Warwick's secret encouragement, thousands of north countrymen led by a mysterious ‘Robin of Redesdale' rose in Yorkshire. Listing grievances similar to those of Jack Cade, pointing out that Henry VI had lost his throne because of bad government and courtiers such as the Wydevilles, they marched south. At the same time Clarence sailed with Warwick to Calais where the earl was still captain and married his elder daughter Isabel, then returned to England with his father-in-law. On 24 July Robin's men cut a royal army to pieces at Edgecote Heath near Banbury, Rivers being captured and beheaded. Edward, who had not accompanied the army, surrendered, but after a brief confinement and promising to govern as Warwick and his brother wished, freed himself and returned to London. No more was heard of Robin of Redesdale. This first coup had petered out by Christmas 1469, the king issuing pardons. He did not feel himself strong enough, however, to move against Warwick and Clarence.

The second phase opened in Lincolnshire in February 1470, after Lord Welles and his son Sir Robert attacked a neighbour who was Master of the Horse, and Edward announced his intention of punishing them. Encouraged by messages from Warwick and Clarence, Sir Robert started a full-scale rebellion. Lord Welles lost his nerve, however, and went to court, hoping to defuse the situation. Although he pardoned him, the king sent a message to Sir Robert, saying he would execute his father unless he surrendered. When Robert defiantly marched to attack the royal forces, Edward beheaded Lord Welles, then crushed the rebels at ‘Losecoat Field' near Stamford – where they threw away their doublets to run faster.

During the battle they had shouted, ‘A Clarence! A Warwick!' and on the scaffold Sir Robert confessed he had hoped to make Clarence king. Similar risings had been planned elsewhere, but collapsed after Losecoat Field, despite appeals by Clarence and Warwick, who rode through Derby and Lancashire in the hope of finding supporters. On 2 April Edward denounced his brother and the earl as ‘rebels and traitors' and they fled to Calais.

Outwardly, the Yorkist regime still looked safe. The king felt confident enough to restore Henry Percy to the earldom of Northumberland, compensating Warwick's brother with the title of ‘Marquess Montague' and lands in the West Country – a package that privately the new marquess spurned as a ‘[mag] pie's nest'. Looking back from the 1480s, Dr Warkworth comments how everybody had hoped Edward would ‘bring the realm of England in great prosperity and rest'. Instead, there had been ‘one battle after another and much trouble, and great loss of goods among the common people'.
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And the Great Slump went on and on.

Warwick's third attempt against Edward started at Angers in July 1470, where he begged Queen Margaret's pardon for having fought against the House of Lancaster. He acknowledged Henry VI as king and Edward of Lancaster as Prince of Wales; Edward was then betrothed to Warwick's younger daughter, Lady Anne Neville. Surrendering his place as heir presumptive, Clarence was accepted as the prince's heir – should the prince not beget sons. Eager to overthrow an ally of Burgundy, Louis XI supplied funds, and a Lancastrian invasion force landed in Devon on 13 September. Having been decoyed up to Richmondshire by a feigned rising, which melted away as soon as he arrived, Edward was too far off to organize a defence in time.

Only just avoiding an attempt by Montague to arrest him at Doncaster, Edward galloped to Lynn. From there, on board a
small English merchantman and two ‘hulks of Holland' together with 800 Yorkists who included his brother Richard, he sailed to Flanders on 28 September, pursued by hostile Hansa ships. When they landed at Flushing he presented the English skipper with a marten fur coat in lieu of payment as he was penniless. The Duke of Burgundy gave Edward a pension but refused to see him, sending envoys to congratulate Henry VI on his restoration. Living at Bruges or The Hague, Edward heard how Warwick took control of England as Lieutenant of the Realm, with Clarence as deputy and George Neville as chancellor, and how parliament confirmed Henry's Readeption. The Neville brothers felt so confident that they dismissed their troops.