The War of the Roses (14 page)

Edward avoided all temptations to use the Franco-Burgundian confrontation to rally national unity with a French war, as Edward III had done after 1337 and Henry V had done in 1414–15. (It seems likely that Henry IV would have pursued this policy to a more limited degree had his health not collapsed, as there were indications of it.
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) Edward, like Henry IV and V, had a recent civil war to consider and restless nobles whose loyalty had been lukewarm to distracted, plus armed entourages to either occupy or ‘demobilize'. The danger of neglecting to deal with their ‘low-level' lawlessness had been shown up in the 1450s, and such unchecked violence added to grumbles in Parliament about an ineffective king.
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Indeed, according to one modern theory (by Colin Richmond) all the successful medieval English kings distracted their nobility and united the nation in foreign war; peace caused disorder and conspiracy.
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Arguably, inaction diminished Edward's reputation among his expectant subjects and built up that of his commander-in-chief, Warwick, who a vigorous young king in his twenties could have been expected to outshine in military affairs. He was not the first new young king to be overshadowed by a powerful landed magnate with a vast bloc of landed possessions, a military reputation, and a close relationship to the royal family–Gilbert de Clare, the ‘Red Earl' of Gloucester, had had this relationship with Edward I in the 1270s. De Clare had not sought to intervene in foreign policy as Warwick did in the 1460s, but his local power in Wales had made him a potential threat to his king and their relationship before Edward's accession had been marked by mistrust. However, they avoided a disastrous confrontation, evidently by mutual caution; and Edward made up for his contentious and partisan role in the civil wars of 1264–5 by leading his nobility in war against Llywelyn ‘the Last' of Gwynedd in 1277 and David of Gwynedd in 1282–3. Edward I, like Edward IV, built up a ‘bloc' of royal power in Wales, which was arguably aimed at his over-resourced Marcher barons as much as against rebel Welshmen; he took over the lands of Gwynedd and western Deheubarth as direct royal patrimony. But in Edward IV's case his chosen instrument in the 1460s, Sir William Herbert, was overthrown and executed by Warwick–an act of defiance that nobody dared show to Edward I–and he had to fall back on Richard, Duke of Gloucester and later on the Council acting for the Prince of Wales, Edward, after 1473.

 

The state of the nation and the failure to fight Scotland: a disappointing or a wise king?

Edward had been built up as the national saviour from decades of Lancastrian misrule by a careful propaganda campaign in 1460–1, aided in the Marches by his useful Welsh descent via the Mortimers from Llywelyn ‘Fawr' of Gwynedd. He, not Henry VII, was the lineal heir of the royal line of Gwynedd back to the time of Cunedda in the fifth century, the ‘Son of Prophecy', and his first victory at Mortimer's Cross had been attended by celestial portents (a perihelion, the original ‘Sun of York').
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Yet serious disappointment was apparent in public attitudes as early as 1463, over the failure to fight the Scots, and Edward was not to receive any enthusiastic public backing in the crises of 1469 and 1470. His army melted away at the news of his allies' defeat at Edgecote and as Warwick's treachery became apparent in late July 1469, with the authorities in London admitting the advancing rebel–which they did not do to attackers when the City was similarly at risk and no royal army at hand to aid them in May 1471. The inevitable disillusionment following high expectations in 1461 does not entirely explain this decline in support, and it appears that there was a lack of cohesion and direction in the government's policies, renewal of faction, and a sense by 1468–9 that there had been little improvement from the factional feuds of the 1450s.
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The local disorders of the 1450s had returned by 1467–8, and according to subsequent charges–by Edward's enemies, but believable–the King was accused of partisanship and injustice. He had fed the troubles by allowing great lords' large armies of retainers to get away with intimidation–the same charge made against Henry VI's regime, but now implicating a fully sane and active young adult king. Among the worst cases of perceived favouritism were the execution of Henry Courtenay, brother of the executed and forfeited Lancastrian Earl of Devon, as arranged by his rival Humphrey Stafford (soon to be made Earl), and the intimidation of the jury trying and seizure of the household goods of the ex-Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Cook, in 1468.
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Both were accused and possibly guilty of Lancastrian plots, but irrespective of this it was felt that they had not had fair trials. The Queen and her kin were blamed for ‘framing' Cook in order to loot his possessions, although the main chronicler to record this was Cook's employee so not an unbiased witness.
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There was also the case of the blatant attack on disputed Caister Castle by the Duke of Norfolk to evict his rivals the Pastons, with Edward doing nothing to give the latter justice. (To complicate matters, the Duke's wife, Elizabeth Talbot, was the sister of the King's discarded mistress or ‘wife', Eleanor Butler.
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As in 1381 and 1450, outbreaks of apparently spontaneous armed disturbances by the provincial lower classes followed; and rebel leaders assumed the populist pseudonym of ‘Robin' (i.e. Hood). The implication of this name, as used in the popular ballads, was that the authorities were corrupt and partisan and the oppressed people should rely on ‘vigilantes' to dole out justice. The rebel leadership, sometimes gentry as with ‘Robin of Redesdale' (aka Sir John Conyers) in 1469 and Lord Welles in spring 1470, had their own political agendas as Neville agents spurred on by Warwick to defy the King; the Earl used ‘Robin' to lure Edward north and then to ambush his army at Edgecote Field. But all their local followers cannot be written off as bribed hirelings or Neville tenants following their lords; there was apparently a large army of ordinary Yorkshiremen and Lincolnshiremen in arms in 1470.
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There was an underlying discontent at the lack of royal leadership, which ironically would not have been apparent had Edward led England into war against the Scottish regency or Louis XI (though then complaints about high taxes could have been expected).
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There were complaints at high taxes anyway in 1469, but without the other, more beneficial, effects of a war in distracting the lords' armed local retainers. Both Edward III and Henry V used foreign warfare to send potentially disruptive bands of warriors abroad to plague France not England, most notably in the case of the ‘Free Companies' in the 1360s; Edward IV did not, although he was wise to distrust any promises of long-term alliance from either Louis XI (who abandoned him in 1482) or Duke Charles of Burgundy (who ignored him as an exile in 1471). Edward ignored the attempts of Louis XI to lure him into alliance in 1465–7, despite the proposed handover of Holland and Zealand (plus Louis' daughter Jeanne) to his brother Richard in an Anglo-French attack on Burgundy–a revival of the English interest in a Low Countries domain pursued by the previous Duke of Gloucester, Humphrey, in the 1420s.
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Warwick's ‘showy' embassy to France and close involvement with French embassies to England achieved nothing, which probably added to his proud disgruntlement at being ‘sidelined' from policy-making–and a major proponent of the preferred Burgundian alliance was a Woodville, Anthony, Lord Scales. An anti-French alliance was arranged with the new Duke Charles of Burgundy in 1467, despite the unpopular financial demands connected to Edward's dowry for his sister Margaret, Charles' bride.
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(The long-term results of Edward's choice of ally were to include a ‘Yorkist' haven at Margaret's court in Burgundy for anti-Tudor pretenders after 1485.) No specific Anglo-Burgundian expedition to dismember France was laid down in the alliance, but this was a probable outcome given Charles' recent involvement in the abortive ‘League of Common Weal' French magnate revolt against Louis and the history of Anglo-Burgundian attacks on the French Crown. Edward did not attack France in alliance with Charles in 1469 or 1470, but the French reaction to his alliance with Charles was as dangerous as if there had been open war–Louis' sponsorship of Warwick's reconciliation with ex-Queen Margaret in 1470.
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But it should not be assumed that it was only Edward's snubbing of Louis' embassies in the mid-1460s that caused the resulting French-backed Lancastrian-Neville coup of September-October 1470. Louis was reported to be considering backing Margaret as early as 1467, and the French King's fear of encirclement by an Anglo-Burgundian-Breton alliance meant that he was likely to act against England once his offers had been turned down. The fact that his reaction was sufficient to overthrow Edward was due to the alienation of Warwick, which gave ‘teeth' to his plots; the extent of French backing to other Lancastrian invasions of England (Oxford in 1474, and Henry Tudor in 1485) was more limited. What is unclear is if Warwick could have lived with an English alliance with Burgundy, given his combination of arrogance, a sense of grievance, and apparent intense dislike of Duke Charles.
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Had James II been alive and active or Edward responded to Louis' armed aid to rebels in the north in 1461–3 with military retaliation, the probability is that the 1460s would not have seen this sense of ‘drift' and disillusionment. Given the hopes expressed of Edward in 1461, a sense of national goodwill and unity could have been expected of his commencing a major war as in 1415 and 1337–though eventual grumbling at the cost of war would have followed. Luckily, Louis XI could not have used Henry VI as a political weapon to recall English subjects to their old allegiance if Edward invaded; the ex-King failed to follow his wife into exile in France and after years of being hidden away by partisans in the north-west was captured and placed in the Tower of London in 1465.

The cost and disruption from prolonged civil strife in the 1450s made Edward's caution a wise choice financially. But politics among the high nobility in the medieval period was a constant study in ‘man-management' and personal leadership for the sovereign. Other vigorous young kings who had assumed the throne in controversial circumstances, such as Edward III (and Henry V as his father's heir), chose to unite their fractious nobility round them by invading France. Cost was no less a problem to Edward III's regime than it was to Edward IV's; the former had to rely on lavish promises to and huge loans from the Italian and Low Countries bankers, and defaulted on the former. Indeed, in his early years of French campaigning one reason for basing himself in the Low Countries was to serve as a personal pledge for his loans; at the time his third surviving son, John, was born in Ghent (hence ‘Gaunt') he could not leave the city as he owed huge sums to local merchants. Edward IV's avoidance of this military route to successful leadership saved money and lives, and Louis XI offered him large sums for his alliance unsuccessfully in 1463–5 and successfully when he did invade France in 1475. (The latter treaty was notably unpopular in England as a disappointment to belligerent expectations.
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Arguably, the King aided English economic recovery by his choice, as he did by his eventual decision to accept alliance with Burgundy not France, which aided the traditional economic partnership with the destination of England's cloth-exports (though Louis offered rival trade-opportunities, successfully in 1475). But his decisions–and the absence of a need to invade Scotland–meant that large numbers of landed magnates' retainers who were used to a permanent state of warfare, first in France to 1453 and then in a divided England, were not rounded up and sent out of the country to fight elsewhere. This meant a risk that their lords would use them in local conflicts against their rivals, as their enemies notoriously did in evicting the Pastons from Caister Castle. If the King did not act firmly to halt this and make an example of offenders it would add to the sense of disappointment and ‘drift'.

The combination of the Woodville marriage and the alliance with Burgundy illustrated and contributed to Warwick's estrangement from the King, and thus to his armed assertion of his power over the latter in 1469. The loyalty that he had shown the Yorkist cause so far made his revolt surprising, and he was needed as a commander and the master of huge tenant levies if Margaret of Anjou and/or Louis XI invaded. The King cannot be blamed for trusting him in the way that he can be blamed over excessive trust of the ex-Lancastrian Somerset, who he seems to have treated as a Court intimate to no avail.
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But he had already received warnings about the Earl, who had refused to attend court to explain himself, and by standing in the way of Clarence's marriage to Isabel Neville in 1468–9 Edward showed that at the least he feared to let Warwick have a tempting candidate as the next king in the form of his ambitious brother as son-in-law. Warwick was already over-willing to respond to insults or seeming challenges by 1460–1, as seen by his alleged abuse of the captive Sir Richard Woodville (not yet his rival as father of his new Queen) for his upstart marriage to Bedford's widow, Jacquetta.

If Edward IV had accepted his terms for alliance with Louis in 1466 and been available to marry Bona this would not necessarily have avoided a clash in the future. (The proposed alliance would have married Edward's brother Richard off to Louis' daughter and given him part of the Low Countries if conquered; it would thus have removed the future Richard III from English politics and a Neville marriage.) Warwick could still have turned to alliance with his elder daughter Isabel's new husband, George of Clarence, in c. 1469–72 to intimidate or replace Edward IV; and if Edward had blocked the marriage it would have aroused his anger. (The Burgundian alliance of 1468 raised the possibility of Clarence marrying Duke Charles' heiress Mary, which would have meant he could not marry Isabel as Warwick wanted.) The King's surprise marriage to Elizabeth was by no means the main factor in his breach with Warwick, and even if the double ‘snubs' of the marriage and the Burgundian alliance had gone ahead Edward had the option of setting spies to watch his cousin and arresting him at the first rumour of a plot. He had suspected him and (vainly) ordered him to come to court to explain himself in 1468 after earlier allegations, but in summer 1469 he failed to keep an eye on Warwick's movements.