The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (25 page)

Sand crunched underfoot on London Bridge as Elizabeth Woodville crossed the river Thames and entered England’s capital to be crowned a queen. During the previous winter the bridge had been cleaned and cleared of its foul vapours, and forty-five loads of sand were dumped along its length to assure the grip below the feet of the many lords, ladies and dignitaries who were to cross it in the weekend of celebrations that followed.
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It was Friday 24 May 1465, and the kingdom was about to welcome not only a new queen but also a whole new generation of nobles, all learning their places in a world still being rebuilt.

As ever when celebrating a moment of great royal dignity, London put on a spectacular show. The centre of the bridge was awash with colour, in the form of a massive stage, draped in cloth and paper in gold and green, black and white, red and purple, which provided the setting for actors and actresses dressed as blonde-headed angels, their wings made from hundreds of dazzling peacock feathers. Another actor dressed as St Elizabeth read a greeting while the high-pitched voices of boys rang out from the windows of St Thomas’s chapel, singing songs of praise to the incoming queen. The whole of London, as was customary, thronged with crowds and pageants, and Elizabeth, like so many queens before her, took her stately progress through the cramped but well-scrubbed streets, absorbing the proud scenes that unfolded before her.

Two days later, on Whit Sunday, 26 May 1465, she was crowned in Westminster Abbey, having been met in the hall of the adjacent palace by the youthful figures of Clarence and John Mowbray, fourth duke of Norfolk and marshal of England (who had inherited the duchy on the death of his father in November 1461). Clarence was fifteen and a half and Mowbray only twenty – both on the cusp of manhood but gilded with the highest rank and title. They met the new queen in the saddle: riding about the crowded Westminster Hall on great thick-backed horses draped in gold-embroidered cloth. They greeted her, and the party then processed from the palace to the abbey. Beside the new queen walked the king’s sister Elizabeth, duchess of Suffolk, then twenty-one, and the queen’s sister Margaret, eleven years old and betrothed to the earl of Arundel’s heir. These young ladies were accompanied by forty other dignified women, ranging from duchesses to knights’ wives, all of them dressed in scarlet, with miniver and ermine marking out the highest-ranking from the lowest. Bobbing above the crowd were the queen’s youngest sister, Catherine, aged about seven, and her ten-year-old betrothed, Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, who was the grandson and heir of the old duke killed at the battle of Northampton. This tiny couple was afforded the best view in the house: carried on the shoulders of squires above the throng of glorious nobility below.

Once this glittering party was in the abbey, it witnessed a long and lavish crowning. Masses and the Te Deum were sung. Elizabeth sat, stood and sat again with sceptres in her hands and a crown on her head. Then she returned to Westminster Hall for her coronation feast, surrounded and honoured by more nobles. Some, like Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, were senior figures of the realm, but most of the prominent men in ceremonial positions were of the queen’s own generation. Twenty-four-year-old John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk stood at her right hand holding one of her sceptres, while the twenty-two-year-old John de
Vere, earl of Oxford (following his father and elder brother’s executions for treason), served water from a bowl held by Clarence. The hall blazed with splendour and pomp, tables groaned with food and drink, and minstrels’ music blared out from every different shape and size of instrument. Trumpets blew solemnly as every course of the feast was brought before the queen’s table.
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It was a deliberately youthful pageant, wholly appropriate to a fresh and unconventional monarchy. And at the heart of it all was a group of young men and women who had been flung to the front of the English political world within the space of a few months. If the battles of the 1450s and early 1460s had been fought between ageing men quarrelling about feuds that reached back for decades, Elizabeth’s coronation raised up a generation that might be freed from the bloody binds of the past.

The queen’s coronation was followed by a great coup for Edward’s rule. During the unrest that had led to the battles of Hedgeley Moor and Hexham in 1464 the exiled Henry VI had been smuggled from Scotland into England. For the year that followed he was on the run in the far north, cooped up in the few remaining Lancastrian strongholds and hiding from his enemies. At first he took cover in the massive coastal fortress at Bamburgh, but when that was shot to pieces by Warwick’s cannon Henry moved on, first to Bywell Castle in Northumberland before retreating into more remote hiding places tucked away across the rugged and chilly Pennines. At some times he stayed with one John Maychell in the Cumbrian manor of Crackenthorpe; at others he hid among sympathetic communities of monks. He was more fugitive than returning king. And eventually he was neither: one day in mid-July 1465 Henry was eating dinner with another of his shelterers, Sir Richard Tempest of Waddington Hall, near Clitheroe in Lancashire, when a large party of men, including Sir
Richard’s brother John Tempest, burst into the dining room and tried to arrest him. In the scramble Henry was able to flee from the house into the nearby woods, taking with him a handful of loyal servants. But his days of roaming had come to an end. On 13 July the deposed king and his attendants were tracked down and taken prisoner at Bungerly Hippingstones, a crossing point of the river Ribble.
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Henry was lifted onto a horse, ‘his legs bound to the stirrup’, and marched triumphantly from Lancashire to London, where he was placed in the Tower of London, there to remain indefinitely.
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He was fed reasonably well, given wine from the new king’s cellars, occasionally allowed a new velvet gown and permitted visitors, if they were carefully vetted by his jailers. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the deposed and imprisoned King Henry was not murdered. This had been the fate of the two Plantagenet kings who had lost their crowns before him: Edward II died while in custody at Berkeley Castle in 1327, while Richard II was killed at Pontefract in 1400, the year following his deposition. Ironically, Henry’s survival was perhaps a mark of his uniquely pitiful and ineffectual approach to kingship – for it was much harder to justify killing a man who had done nothing evil or tyrannical, but had earned his fate thanks to his dewy-eyed simplicity. Permitting Henry to remain alive was a bold decision that Edward IV would come to regret. But in 1465 it must have struck the king as a brave and magnanimous act.

With Henry in gentle confinement and his enemies in the north contained, Edward’s reign began to develop a sense of normality. His marriage to Elizabeth, surprising as it may have been both at home and abroad, allowed him to start growing his base of royal support. The queen’s large family made it possible to start knitting many of the other great families of England within the new royal house. Two years after the royal marriage, five of the queen’s sisters were married. Young Catherine was already wedded to the underage duke of Buckingham. A welter of other
matches followed. Anne and Joan Woodville were married to the heirs to the earls of Essex and Kent respectively. Two more sisters, Jacquetta and Mary, were matched with Lord Strange and the heir to Lord Herbert (who would later become earl of Pembroke). Anthony Woodville – the eldest of the brothers – was married to the heiress of Lord Scales, and used the title himself from 1462. Thomas Grey – Elizabeth’s eldest son – married Anne Holland, daughter of the duke of Exeter. This spider’s web of matches between the queen’s relations and the young men and women of the English aristocracy formed links between the new royal family and the future generations of noble dynasties with estates, interests and followers all across the realm, planting new threads of royal connection from East Anglia and the midlands to Wales and the west country. But before long, the creation of this sprawling new royal affinity became a matter of contention between Edward and the man who felt he was owed most of all by the new regime. As the Woodvilles increased their power and Edward grew in confidence, so the earl of Warwick began to feel more and more uneasy. A succession of clashes over policy and personalities was coming to a head between the king and his greatest subject. The two men whose family alliance had secured the Yorkist crown were about to blow the entire project apart.

From the very beginning of his reign, Edward was determined to present himself as a king not merely by right of conquest, but by right of blood and birth, even destiny. Following his coronation in 1461 he commissioned for public display a vast, twenty-foot illuminated manuscript roll illustrating his ancient claim to be a king – not only king of England and France, but also of Castile, to which the house of York occasionally trumpeted its right. The ‘coronation roll’ that was produced after months of painstaking work some time before the king’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 was a mass of colours, names, heraldic devices and dynastic tables. At the top towered Edward, resplendent in plate armour aboard a bright-liveried warhorse, a huge sword in his right hand, a gold crown on his head and a smile of regal triumph on his red lips. Below this magnificent figure stretched a genealogical chart packed with detail, explaining the king’s descent from Adam and Eve, down through Noah and out into all the known ages of human history, until they coalesced in the three main royal lines of England, France and Castile, all flowing through Richard duke of York and down into an eight-pointed star representing Edward once again. All over this extraordinary public demonstration of the king’s blood-borne, heaven-ordained royalty were Edward’s favourite personal symbols: the fetterlock that his father had worn on his robes when he first claimed the crown in 1460, the black bull representing the Mortimer family’s true claim to the English crown, the arms of Cadwalladr, ancient king of the Britons, the golden sun, recalling both the true Plantagenet line descending to Richard II and,
more recently, Edward’s victory at Mortimer’s Cross – and most frequent of all, the five-pointed white rose, the blazing symbol of the house of York.
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For all this magnificent visual posturing, the house of York needed to produce an heir. The king had two younger brothers – George duke of Clarence and Richard duke of Gloucester – and three sisters – Anne duchess of Exeter, Elizabeth duchess of Suffolk and Margaret of York. But his reign would only really acquire security when he produced a son and heir. For this reason, much excitement greeted Queen Elizabeth’s confinement in the new royal apartments at the palace of Westminster during the early days of 1466, to be delivered of her first child.

The baby was born on 11 February in a room staffed solely by women, into which not even the queen’s personal physician, Dr Dominic de Sirego, was allowed. It was a healthy child, although not the boy that the king had been hoping for. The infant was called Elizabeth, a name that had some distant Plantagenet history as well as running in the Woodville family.
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Both the baby and the mother were treated with all honour and reverence. Remarkably, Elizabeth was the first princess to have been born to a reigning queen of England for more than one hundred years and she was given an appropriately splendid christening, at which her grandmothers, Cecily duchess of York and Jacquetta duchess of Bedford, both stood as godmothers. Beside them as the tiny baby was baptised was the princess’s godfather, Richard earl of Warwick.

What Warwick was thinking at the time of the christening will never be known. If he was seriously disaffected by Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville then at this point he was biting his tongue. Certainly he was still gaining handsomely from his position as the greatest magnate under the king. He presided over the lavish churching ceremony, to welcome the queen back into society following the princess’s birth – a public prominence
that recalled his ostentatious accompaniment of the captive King Henry VI through the streets of London in July 1465. He was commissioned to seek a treaty with Burgundy in the spring of 1466, notwithstanding his clear preference for a treaty with France. The following February, he was allowed to take a massive entourage on a diplomatic embassy to Louis XI, in which he gave the French king English dogs, and was rewarded with chests full of money, textiles and gold and silver plate.
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At home he was showered with lands and offices: the castle of Cockermouth in Cumberland, the hereditary office of sheriff in Westmorland, custody of all royal forests north of the Trent, profits of all the royal gold and silver mines in the same region, and wardship of the lands of the wealthy peer Lord Lovell when that gentleman died and left an underage heir. Warwick was rich, and getting richer.
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All the same, against this background of royal patronage, favour and delegated power, divisions were opening along several lines between the king and his greatest nobleman. And as the first decade of Edward’s reign wore on, Warwick would come to feel that all the power and riches in the world could not satisfy his desire for more.

The biggest area of disagreement was over foreign policy. Warwick’s desire to come to terms with France, rather than to pursue an alliance with Burgundy – the favoured policy of the queen’s father, now Earl Rivers – had not dimmed. Edward indulged him to a degree. But while Warwick was absent courting the French, the king directly undermined his mission by receiving in great splendour a rival embassy led by Anthony, the
grand bâtard
of Burgundy – Duke Philip the Good’s second son, born to one of his many mistresses. Like Edward IV, the Bastard was renowned for his taste for fine living, dazzlingly bejewelled clothes and beautiful women. He was a boon companion and an excellent sportsman, famous as one of the most skilful archers in northern Europe. He was fond of jousting, and when he arrived in England during the
spring of 1467 Edward greeted him with every honour. A tournament had been arranged between the Bastard and Anthony Woodville, Lord Scales, to be held at West Smithfield, just outside the walls of the city of London. As gravel and sand from the banks of the Thames were carted to the tournament ground and a great viewing platform was built by the king’s carpenters, the Bastard was treated to rides along the river in barges hung with tapestry and gold cloth; he slept in gold-hung beds at his London lodgings and was generally borne about the town with all the reverence due to a king.

The tournament, held from 11 June to 14 June 1467, was a success, despite a disappointing first day on which Scales lanced the Bastard’s horse, a dastardly move held to be quite contrary to the rules of the joust, which left the animal ‘so bruised that he died … a while after’.
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On the second day the two men fought on foot with battle-axes, going at one another so fiercely that eventually the king had to intervene, commanding them to stop and refusing their request to finish the fight with daggers. The event ended happily, with the two lords embracing and everyone celebrating the end of the tournament with a huge feast attended by scores of stunningly dressed young English ladies.
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There could have been no greater show of comradeship and courtly affection between the ruling families of England and Burgundy. The Bastard’s visit was cut short by news of the death of his father, Philip the Good, on 15 June. Nevertheless, his departure from the realm concluded a visit that had illustrated the king’s clear desire for friendship.

Duke Philip’s death broke off Warwick’s embassy to France. He returned laden with silver and gold, but aware that in his absence his standing in foreign affairs had been badly damaged. And things were no better at home, where the ejection of his brother George, the archbishop of York, from the office of chancellor – an event buried beneath the blaze of the Bastard
of Burgundy’s visit – meant that the family had been removed from their central position in the administration of domestic government, too. As the archbishop fell from grace, the king’s father-in-law Earl Rivers was rewarded with promotion to treasurer and constable – a pair of offices that gave him sweeping powers over royal finance and military might. It looked like a coup designed to put the Nevilles in their place. Warwick had done too much to put Edward on the throne to bear this double slight with equanimity.

Following the death of Philip the Good, Edward’s alliance with Burgundy grew steadily closer. He conceived it as part of a broad anti-French strategy in which alliances could be constructed with a ring of France’s mutual enemies: treaties of friendship were also signed with Brittany, Denmark and Castile, and were pursued with Aragon and Armagnac.
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In October 1467 the king’s clever, courtly and well-educated sister Margaret agreed to marry Charles, the new duke of Burgundy (later nicknamed ‘the Bold’), turning down no fewer than four matches proposed by Louis XI. Just as at Princess Elizabeth’s christening, Warwick played a central ceremonial role in the king’s sister’s marriage. In May 1468 he accompanied Margaret as she left London by the pilgrim road to Canterbury, headed for the busy port of Margate on the isle of Thanet, whence she would set sail aboard a ship called the
New
Ellen
for the Netherlands and her new life as duchess at the dazzling court of Burgundy. Warwick and Margaret rode in splendour on the back of the same horse: he in front and she right behind him.
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Despite his role in Margaret’s departure and the continued flow of royal gifts, Warwick’s discomfiture was becoming obvious. The chronicler Warkworth believed that Margaret’s marriage made decisive his breach with the king: ‘And yet they were accorded diverse times: but they never loved together after.’
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Warwick had been forced to accept two other obnoxious matches. The queen’s
son Thomas Grey had married the king’s niece Anne Holland, the only daughter and heiress of Henry Holland, duke of Exeter – despite the fact that Warwick’s nephew had been promised Anne’s hand. Then a far more grotesque and insulting marriage was arranged between the twenty-year-old John Woodville and Katherine Neville, Warwick’s aunt and the dowager duchess of Norfolk. Katherine was not only a four-time widow but also about sixty-five years old. The medieval marriage market was more usually organised according to the principles of political advancement than romance, but there were certain limits of good taste. If anything could be said to symbolise the impertinence of the Woodvilles it was this nakedly grasping match between a vigorous upstart barely out of his teens and a blue-blooded crone. One chronicler, cattily estimating that the duchess was a bride again at ‘the young age of eighty’, called it a ‘diabolical marriage’.
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Warwick had two daughters, Isabel, born in 1451, and Anne, five years younger, who were at or approaching marriageable age. He had no sons, and thus his family’s future depended on their making good matches. Warwick’s great desire was for Isabel to marry George duke of Clarence, but in early 1467, amid a seemingly incessant parade of matches between the king’s and queen’s families and the rest of the English nobility, Edward IV declined to allow it. This along with the steady drip of other insults was enough to drive Warwick into a deep sulk. By January 1468 he had retreated to his northern estates and repeatedly refused to attend the king’s council at Coventry if Lord Herbert, Earl Rivers or Lord Scales was present. His appearance at Margaret of York’s departure for Burgundy was one of the last times that he engaged in any meaningful public way on the side of a king whom he had made, but could no longer control. He was, as one chronicler put it, ‘deeply offended’.

By 1468 Edward’s kingly experience was growing and his family was expanding. A second daughter, named Mary, was born in August 1467 and a third, Cecily, would follow in March 1469. But the problems of a usurper king had not entirely left him. The threat to his crown was much reduced – not least because Henry VI continued to languish at the Tower of London – but it had not entirely vanished. Having offended Louis XI by allying with Burgundy, Edward had exposed himself to renewed French backing of plots against his throne. In June 1468 Jasper Tudor was funded to launch a small invasion of Wales. He landed at Harlech Castle, raided his way across north Wales, captured Denbigh Castle and proclaimed Henry VI to be the true king at ‘many sessions and assizes’ held in the old king’s name.
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Tudor was beaten back to the sea within weeks by an army under Lord Herbert, who captured the supposedly impregnable Harlech Castle, a bastion of defiant Welsh Lancastrianism ever since Edward’s accession. (Herbert was rewarded for his efforts with his foe’s old title of earl of Pembroke.) The less fortunate captains of Harlech, including one John Trueblood, were taken to London and beheaded in the Tower. But this was not the end of Edward IV’s troubles.

Jasper Tudor’s invasion was followed by rumours of other plots. ‘That year were many men impeached of treason,’ wrote one chronicler.
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The London aldermen Sir Thomas Cook and Sir John Plummer and the sheriff Humphrey Hayford were accused of plotting and deprived of their offices, while a noble conspiracy was detected involving John de Vere, heir to the earl of Oxford who had been beheaded in February 1462, and the heirs of the Courtenay and Hungerford families. De Vere was imprisoned and eventually pardoned, but the other two were condemned and killed in early 1469. And so it was across the realm: ‘Diverse times in diverse places of England, men were arrested for treason, and some were put to death, and some escaped,’ recalled one writer.
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As the plots seemed to spiral, England was becoming
generally more violent: a spate of aristocratic warmongering was the subject of complaint during the summer parliament of 1467, which implored the king to deal with the ‘homicides, murders, riots, extortions, rapes of women, robberies and other crimes which had been habitually and lamentably committed and perpetrated throughout the realm’.
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It is hard to know now whether the increased sensitivity to conspiracy was genuinely the sign of more dangerous times, or of paranoia in the king’s council. From late 1467 there had been rumours that Warwick was in touch with Margaret of Anjou, who was living in uncomfortably impoverished exile with a small court of dissidents at her father’s castle of Kœur, 150 miles east of Paris. Even if these rumours were nothing more than baseless gossip, the earl’s cold and obstructive behaviour in early 1468 did nothing to suggest his total loyalty to the regime. And indeed, when another front of disorder and opposition to Edward’s rule opened in 1469, Warwick finally decided to abandon the king and throw in his lot with a man who might prove to be more pliable. But it was not a Lancastrian: rather, Warwick decided to make use of the man who would be his son-in-law, Edward’s own brother and still his male heir, George duke of Clarence.