The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (10 page)

Even if Cook’s case cannot be attributed simply to the rapacity of the Woodvilles, it is possible that Cook was innocent and that his actions were misinterpreted by a panicky government nervous about Cook’s influence, particularly at a time when it well suited the cash-strapped king to be able to impose a large fine.
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Whether Cook was innocent or not, it was clear as the affair came to an end that trouble was afoot, and that the Woodvilles, as both royal relations and royal favourites, would be in the thick of it.

In 1469, a royal jester named Woodhouse, wearing high boots and clutching a staff, ambled into the king’s chamber. Questioned by the curious king, he explained, ‘I have passed through many countries of your realm, and in places that I have passed the Rivers have been so high that I could hardly escape through them, but was fain to search the depth with this long staff.’ Lest the reader miss the point, the
Great Chronicle
explained helpfully, ‘The king knew that he meant It is by the great rule which the lord Ryvers & his blood bare that time’.
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The Woodvilles had come a long way since their ‘rating’ at Calais nine years before. Unfortunately, they had also made an implacable enemy – Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.

Edward IV’s own relationship with Warwick had been going downhill. As the Crowland Chronicler points out, the break between the men seems to have been precipitated not by Edward’s marriage (although the marriage certainly served notice that Edward was his own man), but by foreign policy.
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Warwick favoured an alliance with France, Edward IV (and the Woodvilles) with Burgundy. In September 1465, an opportunity presented itself when the Duke of Burgundy’s heir, Charles, Count of Charlois, became a widower. Edward possessed a valuable bargaining tool: his youngest sister, Margaret, who was attractive and of marriageable age.

Keeping his options open, at the end of 1466 Edward IV employed Earl Rivers and his son Anthony to treat with Burgundy while Warwick negotiated with France.
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During June 1467, when Warwick was in France, things at home were staying quite busy. The earl’s younger brother George, the Archbishop of York, was dismissed from his post as chancellor; in a particularly tactless move, Edward IV had gone to the archbishop’s sickbed at home to take away the Great Seal.
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Anthony, Count of la Roche, a half-brother of Charles known as the Bastard of Burgundy, had come to England to take part in a tournament with Anthony Woodville.
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The tournament, one of the great spectacles of the decade, had been in the making since April 1465, when Anthony, coming from Mass, was surrounded by the queen and her ladies, who tied a collar of gold around his right thigh and dropped a billet in Anthony’s cap, which he had removed from his head while kneeling before Elizabeth. Perceiving that he was charged with undertaking a chivalric enterprise, Anthony quickly consulted the king, who authorised his brother-in-law to issue an invitation to the Bastard, in which Anthony assured his opponent that he offered the challenge not through arrogance, presumption or envy, but only to obey his fair lady.

Minutely described by contemporaries, the tournament shows Edward IV’s court – and the Woodvilles – at their most glittering. On the first day of the tournament, 11 June, in the presence of King Edward and many nobles, Anthony made his entrance in a horse trapped with white cloth of gold, embroidered with a cross of St George of crimson velvet and bordered with a fringe of gold half a foot long. Eight other horses, also elaborately trapped, followed. The Duke of Clarence, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Arundel, the Earl of Kent, Lord Herbert and Lord Stafford bore Anthony’s two helms, two spears and two swords. Anthony also had his own pavillion of blue satin, embroidered with his (unrecorded) motto and topped with eight banners.

The fighting between Anthony and the Bastard was spread over two days and is marked by both controversy and confusion. On the first day, the men’s horses slammed into each other, killing the Bastard’s unfortunate steed. Chester Herald reported that after the Bastard’s horse struck his saddle, Anthony rode to the king and removed his own horse’s trapper to show that there was no steel spike that could have harmed his opponent’s horse, while the Great Chronicle indicates that there was indeed a steel spike that pierced the horse’s nostrils. Olivier de Marche, a Burgundian, wrote that the stroke and the fall happened by mischance. An anonymous Burgundian, on the other hand, wrote that when the horse was examined the following day, a large piece of metal was found in its throat. As Sydney Anglo, trying to make sense of the divergent accounts five hundred years later, remarked, ‘[T]he Smithfield tournament of 1467 is especially salutary in demonstrating the dubious nature of eyewitness evidence’.

If Anthony had indeed engaged in foul play, it seems unlikely that the Bastard would have agreed to fight him the next day. Fight again the men did, this time on foot with axes and daggers, King Edward having vetoed the use of casting spears. After Anthony’s father made the sign of the cross three times over his son, and the two men exchanged taunts – Anthony is said to have yelled, ‘Ha, sa, sa, sa, sa!’ – the knights exchanged blows with their axes until the king at last called a halt to the proceedings. Chester Herald claimed that the men ignored the king’s cry of ‘Whoo!’, while the anonymous Burgundian chronicler maintained that Anthony unilaterally disregarded the order to stop. Olivier de la Marche, who described the axe fighting as the fiercest he had seen, claimed that Anthony’s armour was covered with gashes inflicted by the Bastard, and the other Burgundian chronicler noted that the third shoulder plate of the Bastard’s armour had been hacked away. The exhausted men parted courteously and repaired to their lodgings. Over the next few days, other men fought, including Anthony’s friend Louis de Bretaylle, a Gascon who was attended by both Anthony and his father.

The Smithfield tournament was not the Bastard’s only mission in England, however. While lodging at the Bishop of Salisbury’s house at Chelsea, he received a visit from Edward IV, Lord Hastings, Earl Rivers, and others. The king and the Bastard met privately in the garden for over half an hour, after which they were joined by Earl Rivers and treated to wine and spices. It seems likely that the visit was not merely a social occasion, but an occasion for some negotiations behind the scenes.
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The issue of Charles’s marriage assumed even more importance when, on 19 June, the festivities were cut short by the news that Philip, Duke of Burgundy, had died on 15 June, leaving Charles as the new Burgundian ruler. On 25 June, Anthony bade farewell at Dover to the Bastard.
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Warwick, who had been heaped with gifts of plate and luxurious fabrics during his stay at the French court, came back to find himself in eclipse. He had brought his own French embassy with him, who departed in August with no more than some modest gifts of hunting horns, leather bottles, and mastiffs and the king’s promise to send a return embassy.
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Lest anyone be in doubt as to how the wind had shifted, on the same day that the French embassy embarked for home, Edward announced that he had renewed a peace pact with Burgundy.
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Warwick returned in high dudgeon to his estates in the north, while Margaret of York agreed on 30 September to marry the new Duke of Burgundy. Ten days earlier, Anthony Woodville and others had been commissioned to go to Burgundy and treat with the duke.
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Warwick made no secret of his displeasure with this turn of events. Sent to England by Louis XI to make contact with Warwick, the pleasantly named William Monypenny wrote that on 7 January 1467, Warwick had refused a summons to court on the grounds that he would not go to the king as long as Earl Rivers, his son Lord Scales, and William, Lord Herbert (another upstart, and a Welsh one at that) were with him. That same month, Earl Rivers’s house at Maidstone was attacked by Warwick’s tenants, probably at Warwick’s instigation.
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Despite this, Earl Rivers met at Nottingham with the Archbishop of York, who in turn persuaded Warwick, his brother, to attend a council meeting at Coventry. There, Warwick was reconciled with Herbert, as well as with some other men who had landed on Warwick’s enemies list. No reconciliation with the Woodvilles, however, was forthcoming.
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Warwick was on sufficiently good terms with the king in July 1468 to join Edward and his brothers in escorting Margaret, the king’s sister, to Margate, from where she was to embark to go to her new groom in Burgundy.
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It was Anthony Woodville, however, who crossed the seas with Margaret, serving as her presenter and underscoring the role that the queen’s relations had taken in promoting the Burgundian match. First among Margaret’s ladies was Elizabeth Talbot, Duchess of Norfolk; the second was Lady Scales, Anthony’s bride, making a rare appearance in the historical records. Anthony’s younger brother John (he of the elderly bride) was on hand as well. They were in rarefied company: as John Paston III wrote to his mother from Bruges, ‘And as for the duke’s court, as of lords, ladies and gentlewomen, knights, squires and gentlemen, I have never of no like to it, save King Arthur’s court. And by my troth, I have no wit nor remembrance to write to you, half the worship that is here’.
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Both Anthony and his brother took part in the splendid tournaments that followed the ducal wedding. Anthony did not joust against the Bastard of Burgundy this time, as, according to John Paston, the men had vowed at Smithfield not to meet again in arms. The Bastard, however, led Anthony onto the field.
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As for John, he was beginning to come into his own as a jouster; in the spring of 1467, he and Lord Hastings, among others, had jousted against a team which included Edward IV and Anthony Woodville.
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In Burgundy he was declared the prince of the tournament for three reasons: he was a foreigner; he was young and handsome; and he had acquitted himself honourably.
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Even at the glittering Burgundian court, however, reality had intruded itself upon the wedding celebrations. The Duke of Burgundy had been supporting several Lancastrian exiles, notably Edmund Beaufort, who thanks to the killing of his father at St Albans in 1455 and the execution of his brother at Hexham in 1465 was the latest Duke of Somerset, at least nominally. To avoid the awkwardness of having a prominent Lancastrian present at the Duke of Burgundy’s marriage to the sister of the Yorkist king, Somerset had been sent out of Bruges the day before Margaret’s arrival.
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His absence did not stop two members of the Duchess of Norfolk’s train, John Poynings and William Alford, from being executed in November on suspicion of having had ‘familiar communication’ with Somerset during their trip abroad.
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Edward’s reign was, in fact, running into problems. Edward had raised taxes, a move as unpopular as such moves generally are, with little to show for it, and he had failed to contain the lawlessness which had been a hallmark of the last disastrous years of Henry VI’s reign.
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It was a situation ripe for exploitation by Edward’s enemies, at home and abroad. In June, in the midst of the wedding preparations, the suspected Lancastrian courier Cornelius had been arrested, leading to the arrest of Thomas Cook and others. Sir Richard Woodville, the queen’s brother, himself captured Thomas Danvers, the recipient of a letter carried by Cornelius. More arrests, including those of Poynings and Alford, followed in November, including that of one Richard Steres, recalled fondly as one of ‘the cunningist players at the tennis in England’.
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Besides the sporting Richard Steres, the government netted three alarmingly high-profile individuals: Sir Thomas Hungerford, whose Lancastrian father had been executed at Hexham in 1464, after fighting for Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, Henry Courtenay, the Earl of Devon’s heir, and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Warwick’s brother-in-law. Said to be kept in irons in his Tower cell, Oxford ‘confessed much things’ and was eventually released. The others were not so lucky: Poynings, Alford, and Steres were executed in November 1468, and Hungerford and Courtenay were tried and executed the following January.
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Oxford was eventually released.