The Last Plantagenets (53 page)

Clarence was brought to trial before the Parliament which met in January 1478, the king himself appearing in the role of accuser. A long list of offenses was produced, including a charge that he had spread a story that Edward was illegitimate and had no right, therefore, to be king. Edward summed up the evidence against his brother by declaring that he, as king, could not answer for the peace of the realm if Clarence’s “loathly offences” were pardoned.

Clarence had no one to support him, to say a word in his defense. His undisciplined conduct apparently had set the whole nation against him. The members of the House listened to the witnesses in complete silence, without any effort to probe into the facts. When Clarence protested his innocence and cried out his willingness to meet anyone in mortal combat to prove it, the silence remained unbroken. Never before, perhaps, had there been more readiness in passing a bill of attainder.
The punishment was left to a court of chivalry which met promptly. Inevitably he was sentenced to death.

Edward now became the victim of doubts. Having been driven to action by his brother’s treacheries, he still did not want to be responsible for his death. Their mother, the once Proud Cis of Raby, now broken by the impending tragedy, begged that clemency be shown her erring son. Richard, putting aside all his reasons for resentment, pleaded in the same cause. A week passed and the king was still unable to make up his mind.

Finally the House took the initiative by petitioning him to carry out the sentence. This display of constitutional pressure was what Edward needed. He decided that Clarence should die but declared there must not be a public execution. As a sop to his own doubts and feelings, and because of a belief that spectators must not witness the punishment of a prince, he ordered that the execution be carried out within the Tower.

By thus drawing a screen over the event, he created one of the strangest mysteries in English history. How did Clarence die?

With public curiosity at boiling point, it was impossible to conceal the fact that the sentence had been carried out on the seventeenth or eighteenth of February. But then a curious story began to circulate, to pass from mouth to mouth, to fill the minds of all people with fascinated horror, to set the customers in taverns into goggle-eyed speculation over their ale. Clarence, at his own request, had been drowned in a butt of the rare wine called malmsey; such was the story.

No other explanation has been forthcoming. Neither the officers of the Tower, nor the close-lipped custodians of policy in the halls of state, not the king himself nor his household took steps to deny the story. Either there was truth in it or they were reluctant to contradict it by telling what actually had happened. It may very well have been felt that, if no explanation were made, the rumor would be dropped in course of time by reason of its own fantastic weight.

But the story did not die. Three of the writers who were setting down the chronicles of the day, two English and one French, accepted the butt of malmsey without any qualms. And so the pens of later-day historians, which pass confidently and easily over many stories which seem to fall somewhat into the realm of fairy tales, came to a hesitation at this point. What was to be believed? And what could be written in explanation?

Some deny it as absurd. Some suggest, rather weakly, that there might have been an element of accident about it. One earnest seeker after truth went to the extent of measuring the quarters where Clarence had been kept to see where the butt could have been located. One version,
in a play, suggests that the executioner, proceeding along other lines, used the butt as an easy means of completing his task.

And yet a study of the circumstances makes it possible to put some reliance in the story of the butt of malmsey.

Malmsey was a strong but sweet wine which came from the Morea in Greece. It was perhaps the most favored beverage of the day, the wine of kings and princes and people of wealth. The common man never partook of it. The cost was too high.

Clarence undoubtedly was a malmsey addict. It is clear that he had a sybaritic strain in him and so he would prefer this fine wine to any other.

A study of the character of this man makes it clear he had an acute dread of death. He was not a fatalist in any sense of the word and could not be expected to meet death with resignation. He was flighty, treacherous, impetuous, proud to a point of unreason, selfish in every thought and instinct, and he was young to die—only twenty-eight and in sound health. It goes without saying that the hours which passed after he was told he must die were filled with panic and a suffocating fear of what that meant. Although not actually a coward, every moment would pass in fear of the sharp edge of the headsman’s ax. He would see it suspended over his head as he knelt at the block. He would live in dread of the moment when it would cut through his neck. Other ways of ending the privileged existence of a prince of the blood royal would seem almost as dreadful, particularly the horrible agonies of death from poisoning.

But there had always been a partial belief, or a myth, that drowning is an easy death. Perhaps Clarence thought of that and believed also that a taste of a favorite wine on his palate would lessen still further the pangs of death.

One point seems reasonably certain: if Clarence
did
make such a suggestion, Edward would have accepted it as an easy solution of a harrowing problem. George must die. Let him die, then, the way he desired.

A wine butt is a large container. In the fifteenth century it was constructed to hold 120 gallons and sometimes a little more. It might not be practical to carry one through the narrow and sharply angled passages of the prison. Certainly it would be impossible to get one through the door of a cell. The conscientious investigator who sought to ascertain where the butt stood in Clarence’s cell might have saved himself his pains. The butt would not have been taken to Clarence, he would have been taken to it.

This would have been the method employed. He would have been securely trussed and then led, or carried, down into the dark, dank cellars of the Tower where the wine butts stood. And there, his knees bound close beneath his chin, the troublesome prince would have been lowered into the wine he had imbibed so appreciatively in life, and the cover closed down securely.

This is no more than a theory. The mystery which Edward IV created by his desire to get rid of Clarence as secretly as possible will always remain a mystery.

T
HE dynastic struggles called the Wars of the Roses were the cause of widespread suffering in England. An equally serious charge may be laid on the doorsteps of the titled contestants who split the nation apart in the latter half of the fifteenth century. While Englishmen rode or marched to battle under either one of the two symbolic roses, the Renaissance was sweeping Europe. Men were awakening to new intellectual interests, to the study of new philosophies, to the enjoyment of great advances in the arts. These significant changes, which reached a high point in the years when the English civil war attained its peak of savagery, were reflected rather dimly in the island kingdom. Chaucer had died before the fighting began, but a few other pens were still devoted to writing in the English tongue. On the whole the period was undistinguished and dreary.

It would be unfair, however, to pass by these years, after detailing the trials, the cruelties, the loves, the hates, the intrigues of an England resounding to the clash of arms and the fearsome booming of new weapons called cannon, without turning to one event which opened up great new vistas. During the reign of Edward IV a man named William Caxton set up a curious shop in London for the printing of books.

This is much more worthy of discussion than the strategy of Barnet or the folly of Tewkesbury. This eager and resourceful man, verging on old age when he began work, deserves the nod of posterity as much as the grandiose Kingmaker or the vengeful Margaret.

In October 1470, Edward of England, fleeing from the successful invasion by Warwick, came to Bruges with a party of 700 or 800 men. They were a sorry lot, a hungry and downcast collection of die-hard adherents of the Snow Rose. A throne had been lost and the coins in all of their pockets, if added together, would not have filled a wine cup. The magnificent but unready Edward had even found it necessary to strip the fur-lined coat from his back to pay the master of the ship on which he had crossed the narrow seas. The refugees threw themselves on the bounty of the few friends they had left in the Low Country.

It happened that, by virtue of an act which Edward himself had passed granting a charter to the Merchant Adventurers at home and abroad, the mercers of London had opened a hall at Bruges. Then they had established a governor there to control matters of trade between England and the Flemish merchants. The incumbent at the time was one William Caxton, once a mercer in London and a man of high courage and rare tact, and, of at least equal importance, a man with a vision. His courage he displayed by welcoming the deposed king. It required a stout heart to do this, for the Lancastrians now held London and the members of the Mercers’ Guild, who had appointed him, were paying lip service, at least, to the Kingmaker. His tact entered into the arrangements he helped to make in finding temporary homes for the morose and half-stunned men who had accompanied Edward into exile. His vision would be displayed later.

The house of the Merchant Adventurers in Bruges was large but probably not imposing. It had to be of sufficient size to hold the incoming supplies of English wool and probably the goods to be exported back to England. The living quarters undoubtedly were small, for one of the rules governing the appointment of men to represent the Adventurers abroad was that they must not be married. The building probably stood tall and upright, a many-storied mart of trade, with stout timbers and a great deal of cheerful paint, these being architectural earmarks in the Flemish world. It was a busy hive with so much buying and selling to oversee.

The matrimonial prohibition of the Adventurers provides one of the few clues to the character and personality of Caxton. He was a bachelor, an aging bachelor, moreover, being around fifty years old at this stage of his life. As nothing in the way of a description of him is available, and even hearsay is silent on the subject, it is possible to use
nothing more than imagination in attempting to draw a picture of him. He was undoubtedly an industrious and austere man, devoted closely to his work and the splendid ambition which filled his mind, a good foot shorter in stature than the imposing king, probably plain of face and quiet of mood. He married a little later, probably after he had given up his duties at Bruges. His wife, Maude, gave birth to one daughter named Elizabeth, who married in the course of time a merchant trader in London.

Caxton was beginning to realize that his real interest in life was shifting from merchandising problems to a curious new trade which had risen on the mighty wave of the Renaissance. Printing. The printing of books and pamphlets. The preparation of books was being removed from the skilled hands of monks who spent years on emblazoning beautiful scripts for the powerful and wealthy into the ink-stained fingers of workmen who would make books by the thousands for the reading of the many. It is certain that Edward visited the hall of the Merchant Adventurers in Bruges and that he acquired there, through contact with William Caxton, an interest in printing. With the king went his brother-in-law, Lord Rivers, who had his full share of the Woodville good looks but who possessed something the other brothers of the queen lacked—an interest in letters. Rivers and the earnest Caxton discovered an affinity at once, an admiration for the glossy and easily read volumes which were beginning to roll off presses in Italy and Germany.

Edward’s stay in Bruges was a brief one, for he accomplished the quickest turnabout in history. In a space of time several months shorter than the span of Napoleon’s enforced exile at Elba, the king completed arrangements for a return to England. He had been staying in the town mansion of Louis de Bruges and here his urbanity had made him very popular with the townspeople. When word reached him that a fleet of ships supplied by Louis XI of France had assembled at Damme, the port of Bruges, he left at once with a following not much larger than the party he had brought with him from England. The worthy burghers were so sorry to see him go that Edward decided not to reach the port by using a canal boat but by walking there, so that all the Brugeois would be able to see him en route. The streets were lined with people who cheered the tall monarch and shouted their good wishes. It will be abundantly clear by this time that Edward IV, with all his faults, had an instinct for popularity that has seldom been equaled and never excelled by any wearer of a crown.

Six years later Caxton had passed through some form of self-imposed
apprenticeship, mostly spent at Cologne, and had mastered the mysteries of printing. He proceeded then to carry out his ambition to set up a shop in England where books could be printed in the English tongue. It now becomes apparent that Edward possessed another virtue—not found in all kings—his willingness to remember those who had helped him. Appreciating the courage which Caxton had shown when he was in exile, he now used whatever influence may have been needed to secure for the latter the use of a building at Westminster for the start of his enterprise. Two years later the king granted him the sum of twenty pounds for “certain causes and matters performed.”

There has never been a time when a new trade has come into being without serious opposition. Caxton was to find that the Guild of Stationers in London was strongly against the new method of making books by machinery. What would become of the scriveners and text writers who made their living by the making of copies of books by hand? The church at first considered printing an unholy practice. It was the hand of the devil reaching out to spread wrong thinking and wrong teachings. Without the support of the Crown, Caxton might have found angry mobs gathering outside his shop, ready to destroy the ungodly instruments with which he sought to poison the minds of men. The rumor spread, of course, that he was a Lollard and a man of evil intent.