The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (26 page)

At the beginning of 1468 Clarence was eighteen years old. Like Edward he was capable of charm and wit and he shared with the king what one writer called ‘outstanding talent’.
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He was smooth, elegantly attractive and sharp-tongued – ‘possessed of such mastery of popular eloquence that nothing upon which he set his heart seemed difficult for him to achieve’.
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His childhood under his brother’s rule had been spent in large part at Greenwich Palace, where he lived with his sister, the now departed Margaret, and his younger brother Richard duke of Gloucester. He had been recognised as an adult on 10 July 1466 – still only sixteen years old – when he paid formal homage to the king and was rewarded with possession of massive estates centred on Tutbury
Castle in Staffordshire: a large and modern fortress protected with thick curtain walls and several towers with luxurious residential apartments inside, warmed by giant fireplaces hewn from huge blocks of locally quarried stone. As an important property of the duchy of Lancaster, Tutbury had once belonged to Queen Margaret, who spent a great deal on its improvements. It was a commanding position from which he could survey the sprawling patchwork of lands that he now controlled. Amid this luxury, Clarence enjoyed mastery of the biggest and most lavish household staff of any nobleman in England, consisting of nearly four hundred people at an annual cost of £4,500.
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But if Clarence was superficially attractive, handsomely gifted and indulged by his elder brother, he was also glib, shallow and spoiled.
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Like Warwick, extravagant royal favour only served to increase his ambition. He was bewitched by his own magnificence, and like Humphrey duke of Gloucester (and perhaps like his own father) he saw his position as the king’s male heir as licence to create an ostentatious alternative court. This instinct would lead him into trouble: for while he could at times perform as a competent magnate, settling the debates of his tenants and subordinates, he was a wilful, self-centred and infuriating man with a penchant for skulduggery and schemes.

One such scheme was to pursue marriage to Warwick’s eldest daughter, Isabel. From a royal point of view it would have been considerably more useful for Clarence to have entered into a union with a foreign princess than a Neville (Charles the Bold’s daughter Mary was briefly considered). This may well have been what Edward was thinking when he flatly refused to endorse the marriage in early 1467, though it is more likely that he simply wished to avoid connecting his two greatest nobles by allowing a marriage alliance between them. Warwick’s power needed no bolstering via a direct link to the adult royal heir – traditionally a hub around which opposition to the Crown would gather. The
politics of the midlands, meanwhile, would be thrown horribly out of balance by joining together the two most powerful lords in the region. Warwick began plainly to chafe against the restriction. To the king’s clear concern, his brother George – young, impressionable and used to getting his own way – fell under Warwick’s spell.

The consequences of a Warwick–Clarence alliance against the king whom each had every duty to serve and obey became clear from the spring of 1469. It began in April with a series of popular riots in Yorkshire, as large numbers of local men convened under the leadership of a figure calling himself ‘Robin of Redesdale’ or ‘Robin Mend-all’ – a sort of Jack Cade of the north, whose name was clearly a nod to the outlaw ballads that had by this time been in circulation for more than a century, and whose heroes – Robin Hood, Adam Bell and Gamelyn – embodied the ideal of the wronged man who imposes rough justice on corrupt officials. There were a number of likely causes for this disorder, high among them longstanding local disgruntlement at the demands of St Leonard’s Hospital in York, which had long levied the ‘petercorn’ – a tax on arable farmers – in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland. The master of the hospital had the previous year secured his right to the tax in Edward’s court of chancery.
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Under ‘Robin of Redesdale’ a spate of rioting whipped across the county. It was put down by Warwick’s younger brother, John Neville, earl of Northumberland, the hero of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham and one of the crown’s most reliable men of the north. But within two months ‘Redesdale’ had sprung up again, and this time the Neville family were not the scourges of the rebels, but their covert sponsors.

The second wave of rebellion, which took place in June and July of 1469, was significantly different from the first. The leader still went under the name ‘Robin of Redesdale’, but was in this case either Sir John Conyers of Hornby, Warwick’s steward at
Middleham Castle and an experienced soldier, or else a puppet of the same. Whereas the disorder earlier in the year had focused on local disaffection, now, said one writer, the people ‘complained that they were grievously oppressed with taxes and annual tributes by the said favourites of the king and queen’. A regional uprising had been stirred up into a protest against national government. The second Redesdale rising was secretly supported by Warwick with the aim of causing the king maximum discomfort. And it was done with great effect. There was talk of a popular army of sixty thousand men being mustered in Yorkshire. The disturbances were beginning to resemble what the chroniclers called a ‘great insurrection’ and a ‘whirlwind from the north’.
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Edward set off to deal with the rising in mid-June, accompanied by his youngest brother, Richard duke of Gloucester, along with Earl Rivers, Lord Scales and a number of his other Woodville relatives. At first Edward failed to calculate how dangerous the situation had become, but as he rode north it began to dawn on the king that this was more than a local rising and he sent out urgent demands to the towns and cities of the midlands to supply him with archers and men. He also wrote to Clarence, Warwick and George Neville, archbishop of Canterbury, sending each a terse note on 9 July demanding that they ‘come unto his Highness’ with all urgency. ‘And we ne trust that ye should be of any such disposition towards us, as the rumour here runneth, considering the trust and affection we bear in you,’ he added in his letter to Warwick.
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But as the wax was hardening on the king’s letters, Warwick, the archbishop and Clarence were on their way to the military stronghold of Calais, taking with them the earl’s daughter Isabel.

On 11 July Clarence and Isabel were married in Calais, in direct defiance of the king. The following day, Warwick and his allies wrote an open letter to the king in support of the Robin of Redesdale rising. The letter called for reform, accusing Rivers,
Scales, Sir John Woodville, the earl of Pembroke, his brother Sir William Herbert and Humphrey Stafford, earl of Devon, as well as others around the king, of allowing the realm to ‘fall in great poverty of misery … only intending to their own promotion and enriching’, and warning darkly that the fate that had befallen Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI might just as easily be visited upon Edward IV. They also named Earl Rivers’s wife, Jacquetta duchess of Bedford, as a malign influence on the king. ( Jacquetta would later be accused of having used witchcraft to engineer the king’s marriage to her daughter Elizabeth Woodville, and of creating lead models of Warwick, Edward and the queen for the purposes of sorcery.) A manifesto for reform was attached to the letter – supposedly belonging to the rebels, although as it took an almost exclusively national outlook and was riddled from beginning to end with the sort of political jargon in whose uses the earl of Warwick was the most practised man alive, it was likely to have been either strongly influenced from or wholly manufactured in Calais.
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The northern rising, swelling by the day, was led by Warwick’s relatives and friends. As Sir John Conyers and his son of the same name, Sir Henry Neville and Henry Fitzhugh marched their northerners towards the midlands, Warwick and Clarence returned to England from Calais, landing in Kent on 16 July. Two days later they began a push up the country to join forces with ‘Robin of Redesdale’. They stopped briefly in London before sweeping up the road towards Coventry, gathering men as they rode. Edward, camped with his army at Nottingham, now found a pincer closing rapidly around him. His best hope for repelling the rebels was to receive reinforcements from Wales under the earl of Pembroke, and from the west country under the earl of Devon.

On Wednesday 26 July Pembroke and Devon’s men had reached Banbury in northern Oxfordshire and were camped in
the broad fields surrounding the town when they were attacked without warning by the northern forces. The main body of the royal army was separated from the archers, and they thus went into battle severely hampered. ‘A great battle was fought, and a most dreadful slaughter, especially of the Welsh, ensued,’ wrote one chronicler, who reckoned that four thousand men were killed on the battlefield known as Hegge-cote or Edgecote.
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The considerable disarray among Pembroke’s men was worsened when a small band of warriors bearing the earl of Warwick’s arms arrived in the field, causing panic in the lines and leading many to take flight. The end result was terrible casualties on both sides. The rebel leaders Sir Henry Neville and John Conyers the younger were killed, but the battle was remembered in Wales, as the bloody fate of the Welsh infantry was shared by their commanders. The poet Lewys Glyn Cothi called it ‘the mightiest [ battle] of Christendom’. During the fighting Pembroke and his brother Sir Richard Herbert were captured and taken as prisoners to Northampton, where they were met by the earl of Warwick. On Thursday 27 July Warwick held a summary and utterly illegal trial, pronounced a death sentence and had both beheaded.

Panic spread. News of the disaster at Edgecote took several days to reach Edward IV, but when it did, his men scattered from his side. Alone and totally exposed, the king was taken prisoner at Olney in Buckinghamshire by a party led by Archbishop George Neville. His horse was harnessed to his captors’ and he was escorted to Warwick Castle, the vast and unbreachable midland seat of the Nevilles, to be held captive while his associates were hunted down.
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Throughout August, Warwick’s men stalked England, capturing those men who had served the king and murdering them. Earl Rivers and Sir John Woodville were run to ground in Chepstow and taken to Kenilworth, where both were beheaded. The earl of Devon was taken ‘by the commons’ in Bridgwater, Somerset, ‘and there right beheaded’.
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Despite the fact that Warwick and Clarence were acting effectively alone – mustering their own vast resources rather than manifesting the will of any wider portion of the nobility or the realm – it had taken them less than three months to gain command of the king, butcher his allies and assume control of the government. Edward had spent the best part of a decade establishing his birthright, starting a new royal family, rebuilding a secure crown and a stable government and reasserting the majesty of English kingship. And yet in the late summer of 1469 he found himself in the same predicament as his predecessor: two kings were now prisoners of their own subjects. Seizing the crown had become all too easy.

Like Richard duke of York before him, Richard earl of Warwick found it a great deal simpler to capture a king than to govern in his name. From Warwick Castle in the heart of the midlands, the earl moved Edward to Middleham Castle, the magnificent stonewalled stronghold that loomed over the Yorkshire Dales. But as news filtered across England and Wales of the king’s captivity, the realm erupted into violence and disorder, which proved quite beyond Warwick’s capacity to control: for while he had the royal person, this was by no means the same as having royal authority.

In London there was a burst of robbery, rioting and open violence, barely kept in check by the efforts of Burgundian ambassadors who happened to be in the city. Elsewhere, noble quarrels spilled over into private wars, waged from Cheshire and Lancashire to Gloucestershire and Norfolk, where the Paston family were forced to defend their castle at Caister from a siege laid to it by the duke of Norfolk, who had ‘the place sore broken with guns’.
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Warwick’s realm was alive with the boom of cannon, the hum of arrows and the crackle of flames licking ruined buildings. Even in Yorkshire Warwick could not keep order as the king’s teenage brother Richard duke of Gloucester took up arms in a dispute against Lord Stanley. Worst of all, rumours circulated in Wales suggesting that a Lancastrian revival would shortly be underway somewhere in the realm. And so it proved: in August two members of a renegade branch of the house of Neville raised Henry VI’s banner in northern England. ‘The earl of Warwick found himself unable to offer an effectual resistance,’ wrote one chronicler. ‘For the people, seeing their king detained as a prisoner,
oner, refused to take notice of proclamations’ until Edward was set at his liberty.
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Warwick had no choice. Edward was free by the middle of October. Sir John Paston watched the king ride into the city of London in splendour, surrounded by a large posse of loyal lords including Gloucester, Suffolk and Lord Hastings, the mayor and all the city aldermen, two hundred guild members and what Paston described in a letter as a thousand horses, ‘some harnessed and some not’. The king had crushed the northern rebellion with ease, issued a general pardon to the rank and file and was set on reasserting himself in the realm at large, an end he pursued with almost ominous good cheer. Paston noted with some trepidation that while ‘the King hymself hath good language of’ Warwick, Clarence and their small group of allies, including the earl of Oxford, ‘saying they be his best friends’, quite another message was being broadcast by the men of the royal household. Edward was almost always magnanimous after victory – but it seemed clear, to Sir John Paston at least, that a great reckoning could not be far away.

Only two serious reorganisations took place in the aftermath of Warwick and Clarence’s revolt. The first was enforced: Wales had been deprived of its leading nobleman when William Herbert, earl of Pembroke was beheaded after the battle of Edgecote. In Herbert’s place, Edward promoted his own brother, Richard duke of Gloucester. Aged seventeen, Gloucester was growing into an able soldier and a trustworthy lieutenant. Tall but slender and not as physically striking as either Edward or Clarence, Gloucester was a tenacious and loyal young man in whom Edward saw a great future. He made him constable of England in place of the executed Earl Rivers, justiciar of north and south Wales and steward of the whole principality. In effect Richard became the king’s hand beyond the western marches. He took to his role with some enthusiasm and purpose.

Edward also moved to weaken some of the Nevilles’ power in
the north. John Neville, earl of Northumberland, had remained loyal during his brother’s rebellions; all the same, Edward decided that there were advantages in moving his territorial base away from northern England. The king released Henry Percy from long-term imprisonment in the Tower of London, restored him to his father’s lands in the north and gave him Neville’s title of earl of Northumberland. Historically the Percys had been the dominant family in the north – a fact only changed by the ascendancy of the Nevilles in the 1450s. Now Edward was moving to restore the balance of power. To compensate John Neville for his losses, he was created Marquess Montague and awarded a huge tract of lands in south-west England, another area of perpetual bloodletting and chaos, which had fallen vacant on the death of the earl of Devon. Neville’s young son George was created duke of Bedford and betrothed to the king’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, who turned four years old in the spring of 1470. It looked like a handsome settlement for a loyal man, which served to restore some balance to the power politics of northern England while injecting a degree of much-needed experience into the south-west. Unfortunately, it would prove to have serious consequences for Edward’s rule.

In March 1470 another rebellion broke out. This time it was Lincolnshire that rose up, initially due to a bitter private feud between the local peer Lord Welles and Willoughby and Sir Thomas Burgh, a bodyguard and close servant of the king. In response, Edward raised an army and marched north to put an end to the violence. The sight of the king marching at the head of an army sent rumours whirling around the north, as speculation mounted that bloody revenge was on its way for the events of 1469. As Lord Welles and his son Sir Robert parlayed these fears into all-out insurrection, a desperate Warwick decided to raise an army of his own and throw in with the rebels once more. Once again, the unscrupulous Clarence decided to join him – despite having assured the king of his allegiance – and the pair
aimed at what a government-sponsored account of the rising later described as ‘the likely utter and final destruction of [the king’s] royal person, and the subversion of all the land’.
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After most crises Edward’s instinct was usually towards calmness and reconciliation rather than murderous revenge. But this time he had been provoked too much. He responded with furious aggression. He captured Lord Welles and sent a message to his son that the old man would be killed unless he submitted. This drew Sir Robert out to fight before he had a chance to combine armies with Warwick. At Stamford on 12 March 1470, a royal army routed the Lincolnshire rebels in such humiliating fashion that the insurgents ran from the battlefield, throwing their clothes away as they hastened to escape. The field was thereafter known as Losecote Field.

According to the partisan account later published of the battle, the rebels at Losecote Field ran at the king’s men shouting, ‘A Clarence! A Warwick!’ Some of them were said to be wearing Clarence’s livery, and when Sir Robert Welles was cut down in the chase, his helmet was found to contain ‘many marvellous bills, containing matters of the great sedition’ – in other words, implicating Warwick and Clarence in yet another round of skulduggery.
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This time, the king’s miserable relatives could expect no leniency. They refused summons to the royal presence, fled south from Lancashire to Devon, took ship at Dartmouth and escaped across the Channel, heading once more for Calais. But even here they were denied entry when Warwick’s deputy captain Lord Wenlock declined to open the gates. The two men eventually landed in Normandy, in the territory of the French king. Their isolation appeared to be complete. And indeed it might have been, but for one of the most audacious and unscrupulous alliances in all of English history.

Margaret of Anjou and her son Prince Edward had been living in French exile for nearly ten years. The prince had been raised in his grandfather René of Anjou’s castle of Kœur, in Lorraine, near the banks of the river Meuse. In the spring of 1470 the boy was sixteen years old and quite as unlike his father as it was possible to be. Indeed, those who saw him suggested that he was made in the same mould as his other grandfather, Henry V. In February 1467 the Milanese ambassador Giovanni Pietro Panicharolla commented in a letter to the duchess and duke of Milan that the prince, then only thirteen, ‘already talks of nothing but of cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle or the peaceful occupant of that throne’.
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He loved to ride, fight and joust with his friends and companions. His mother had never given up the idea that this splendid young tyro could some day return to claim his father’s crown.

Margaret’s determination to overthrow the Yorkists knew almost no limit. Since being ejected from England she had appealed for assistance to countless allies in France, as well as to the rulers of Scotland and Portugal. Now, in 1470, she prepared herself to make common ground with the unlikeliest partner of all, the man who had done more than anyone else alive to damage her: Richard earl of Warwick. The old enemies met in Angers on 22 June, in a meeting brokered by Louis XI, and thrashed out a deal. Prince Edward would marry Anne Neville, Warwick’s youngest daughter, and Warwick would then return to England in opposition to Edward IV, doing everything in his power to overthrow the Yorkists and return Henry VI to the throne.

Warwick, Clarence, Jasper Tudor and the earl of Oxford set sail from La Hougue in Normandy on 9 September. The young Prince Edward was left behind with his mother, presumably to his indignant frustration. After four days at sea they landed on the Devonshire coast, announced their allegiance to King Henry VI,
called on all men to join them in their mission of restoration and set out on a march to Coventry to confront Edward IV.

Edward was at this time in the north. He had been kept well abreast of developments over the sea, writing to his subjects in the south-east to tell them that ‘we be credibly ascertained that our ancient enemies of France and our outward rebels and traitors be drawn together in accord, and intend … utterly to destroy us and our true subjects’. He instructed them to be ready for invasion at any moment. ‘As soon as ye may understand that thay land,’ he wrote, ‘put you in uttermost devoir [i.e. your highest duty] … to resist the malice of our said enemies and traitors.’
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Violent uprisings had racked the north throughout the summer, and Edward had been torn between the need to defend a vast coastline and the pressing demand to restore order in the north country only recently restored to the management of the Percy family. When news of Warwick’s landing reached him he set out for London, to defend his crown and capital.

As the rebels marched they gathered numerous powerful defectors, all with reasons to bear a grudge against the king. The earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Stanley brought substantial numbers of armed retainers, and they were followed, most damagingly of all, by Warwick’s brother Marquess Montague. This was far from a critical mass of the English nobility, but the uncertainty of military campaigning seems to have convinced Edward that ‘he was not strong enough to give battle’, particularly if his opponents were to include the formidable Montague.
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Rather than stand and fight for his crown with an inadequate army, Edward ‘withdrew from a contest so doubtful in its results’.
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To give battle immediately for his kingdom might have seemed like a natural course of action. But to do so also risked capture or death.

Edward boarded a ship at King’s Lynn and set sail for Flanders, leaving his kingdom in the hands of his enemies. He left in such haste that he did not even stop to collect his pregnant wife:
Queen Elizabeth was forced to take sanctuary with her three daughters behind the walls of Westminster Abbey. Lodged in the abbot’s apartments, she would give birth there to her first son, yet another Prince Edward, on 2 November 1470. ‘From this circumstance was derived some hope and consolation for such persons as remained faithful in their allegiance to Edward,’ wrote one chronicler. But to the ascendant Nevilles and Lancastrians, ‘the birth of this infant [was] a thing of very little consequence’.

As Elizabeth Woodville laboured in the sanctuary apartments at Westminster, the so-called ‘readeption’ of Henry VI was well underway. The old king was brought out of the Tower of London on Saturday 6 October 1470. His supporters made no delay in formally returning him to his throne, for the most auspicious day in the English royal calendar was fast approaching: the feast day of the Translation of St Edward the Confessor, whose stunning shrine was the centrepiece of all the tombs of the Plantagenet kings inside Westminster Abbey. A week after Henry’s release, ‘after walking in solemn procession, [he] had the crown publicly placed on his head’.
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Henry was now forty-eight years old and jail had not been kind to him. He had, wrote his confessor John Blacman, ‘patiently endured hunger, thirst, mockings, derisions, abuse and many other hardships’.
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The chronicler Warkworth sniffed that he seemed ‘not worshipfully arrayed as a prince and not so cleanly kept’. Nevertheless, many in England seemed able temporarily to convince themselves that since Henry VI had not been the author of the ills done during his reign, he was fit to be restored to the throne. The chronicler Warkworth put this down to Edward’s failure to restore England to ‘prosperities and peace’. So much hope had been invested in him at the beginning of his reign, wrote the chronicler, ‘but it came not; but one battle after another, and much trouble and great loss of goods among the common people’.

Yet if there was any genuine hope placed in Henry’s return to the throne then this, too, would be sorely disappointed. The restoration of Queen Margaret was hardly an event likely to bring reconciliation and understanding to the realm, all the less so if her son had inherited his mother’s implacable temperament. It was virtually impossible to see how Lancastrian loyalists like the Cliffords, Courtenays, Somersets and Tudors might be rewarded, or even restored to their former estates and dignities, when the chief beneficiaries of the Yorkist victory had been Warwick and Clarence, the same men who had helped bring Henry VI out blinking from the Tower and placed the crown back on his head. And then there was the problem of Clarence himself: the faithless rebel had caused so much of the trouble that had descended on England through his selfish desire to inch closer to his brother’s throne. With two rival Prince Edwards now alive – the one a bellicose young Lancastrian, the other Edward IV’s tiny son and heir – Clarence was now further from the crown than ever. How, then, could his lasting support be bought? And how would Warwick enjoy a political role that would surely never reach the near-mastery that he had achieved in the 1460s?