The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (21 page)

A month before Anne Mowbray’s demise, Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, died, leaving a vacancy to be filled.
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On 7 January 1482, Pope Sixtus IV provided Lionel Woodville to the bishopric.
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Lionel had undoubtedly achieved his position through the influence of his brother-in-law the king, but nothing indicates that he was incompetent or unworthy to hold it. His case was not an isolated one: While some bishops were from humble families, Lionel’s own predecessor had family ties to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, while George Neville, Archbishop of York, was a son of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and a younger brother of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.

One aspect of Lionel’s life has proven controversial: did he forget his vows of chastity and father Stephen Gardiner, later Bishop of Winchester? In the sixteenth century, a tradition arose to this effect. It can still be found in older books and, of course, on the Internet, but James Arthur Muller, a biographer of Gardiner, weighed the evidence and rejected it in 1926. He noted that Gardiner’s enemies never accused him of illegitimate birth and that Gardiner was probably not born until the 1490s, eliminating Lionel, who died in 1484, as a father. More recently, C.D.C. Armstrong has estimated Gardiner’s birth date as being between 1495 and 1498.
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It seems safe to say, then, that the Bishop of Salisbury was not the sire of the Bishop of Winchester.

The year took a tragic turn, however, when Mary, the king and queen’s second daughter, died in May at Greenwich, a few months short of her 15th birthday. Mary’s burial at Windsor, also her birthplace, took place on 27–28 May 1482. Among the ladies present were Jane (or Joan), Lady Grey of Ruthin (Elizabeth Woodville’s sister), the widow of Sir Anthony Grey of Ruthin; Joan, Lady Strange, a niece of Elizabeth Woodville who was married to George Stanley; and Katherine Grey, probably the daughter of Lady Grey. The chief mourner is not identified but may have been Lady Grey, the first woman named by the herald who recorded the funeral ceremonies. Had Mary lived, she might have become the Queen of Denmark, for her father had proposed her as a bride for its king, Frederick.
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The king and queen did not have long to mourn their daughter, for there was a distraction: Scotland. Relations had been tense for some time, with raiding by both sides, but in June 1482, events took a new turn when Edward and James III’s brother, Alexander, Duke of Albany, entered into a treaty under which the English would support Albany’s claim to the throne in exchange for certain conditions, among them the return of Berwick, ceded to the Scots in 1461 by Margaret of Anjou during a period when she was in particularly desperate straits. After signing the treaty, Edward commissioned his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as lieutenant general. In July, Gloucester began assembling an army against the Scots. The Earl of Northumberland, the Marquis of Dorset, Lord Stanley, and Edward Woodville were among his lieutenants.
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Edward Woodville took a force of 500 men with him, raised under the name of the Prince of Wales. On his way to the border, he stopped at Coventry, which offered £20 instead of men.
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The campaign, though successful in part, was somewhat anticlimactic. Richard and his men, numbering between 15–20,000, captured the town of Berwick without resistance and marched on to Edinburgh, leaving behind a force to besiege Berwick Castle, which had resisted. The hapless James III, meanwhile, was arrested by his own nobles and was imprisoned at Edinburgh when Richard’s army entered the unresisting capital. At that point, Albany abruptly dropped his claim to the throne, and Richard entered into a treaty with a Scottish delegation, which agreed to return the sums that had been paid toward the abortive marriage of Edward IV’s daughter Cecily to James III’s heir. Richard then headed back to Berwick, leaving Edinburgh unscathed. At Berwick, he disbanded most of his army, leaving only a small force to besiege Berwick Castle, which did surrender on 24 August. The Crowland Chronicler, albeit with a touch of the armchair warrior, grumbled that Richard had let the ‘very wealthy town’ of Edinburgh escape unharmed while gaining only Berwick, which counted more as a loss since it cost the crown 10,000 marks a year.
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Coincidentally, Margaret of Anjou, who had been responsible for the loss of Berwick in the first place, was near death in France when the castle surrendered on 24 August; had she not died the next day, she might have been amused at the bother to which she had put her old enemy, Edward IV.

In light of future developments, one looks for friction between Gloucester and his Woodville lieutenants, Edward and Dorset, but nothing indicates any. Indeed, Gloucester created Edward, along with other men, a knight banneret on 24 July. It is possible that he acted simply to please his brother the king, of course, but his later actions as Richard III indicate that he had a sufficiently high opinion of Edward’s military capacity to be worried about him mounting an invasion.

The Crowland Chronicler closes his account of the year 1482 with an account of Edward IV’s Christmas court at Westminster: ‘In those days you might have seen a royal Court such as befitted a mighty kingdom, filled with riches and men from almost every nation and (surpassing all else) with the handsome and most delightful children born of the marriage […] to Queen Elizabeth’. His account is an elegiac one, and for good reason: he knew, unlike the Woodvilles, that their world was about to vanish.

On 8 March 1483, Anthony Woodville wrote a letter to his man of business, Andrew Dymmock. Anthony and his nephew, Dorset, had agreed that Dorset would take over Anthony’s position as deputy constable of the Tower, and that Anthony and his sureties would be discharged from the bond they had entered into with the constable of the Tower, John, Lord Dudley. In a postscript, he asked for ‘the patent of mine authority about my lord prince’ and a patent given to him by the king regarding his power to raise forces in the march of Wales. The patents were to be delivered to him by ‘some sure man’.
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The patent about Prince Edward concerns the ordinances issued in 1473 that governed the upbringing of the prince, Anthony’s charge.
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What was suitable for a 3-year-old no longer quite worked for a 12-year-old, and one provision gave Anthony, along with his nephew Richard Grey and John Alcock, Bishop of Worcester (formerly the Bishop of Rochester) instructions on what to do if Edward exhibited ‘any unprincely demeaning’. (They were to confront the prince with his misbehaviour and, if the prince would not amend his conduct, raise the matter with the king or the queen or incur the king’s ‘grievous displeasure’.) More important, the prince was not to

    give, write, send or command anything without the advice of the said Bishop, Lord Richard, and Earl Rivers, and that none of his servants presume nor be so bold to move, steer, or cause him to do to the contrary of these ordinances upon pain of grievous punishment and losing his service.

He was always to be accompanied by at least two people – this not being an age that put a high premium on privacy. The prince’s bedtime was raised from eight to nine, and some restrictions about who could come to meals and where they could eat were added – the latter a reaction, perhaps, to the problem of outsiders finding their way to the dinner table. There were also some accounting changes. None of these revisions could be termed drastic, but they did reflect the fact that Richard Grey, Elizabeth Woodville’s younger son from her first marriage, had acquired considerable importance in his half-brother’s household and was now a member of his council. Richard Haute, the queen’s cousin, was the controller of the household. The other officers included the Bishop of Worcester, who was president of the council; Sir Thomas Vaughan, the chamberlain; Sir William Stanley, steward; Sir Richard Crofte, treasurer; and Richard Martyn, Bishop of St David’s, a councillor.

The late Eric Ives, who studied Anthony’s correspondence with Dymmock some years ago, attached particular significance to the 8 March letter in the context of the power struggle that was to erupt after Edward IV’s death a month later. For him, the letter suggested that Anthony and Dorset were ‘making sure that their centres of power were under control in case of trouble’, and perhaps justified the concerns about Woodville power that were to manifest themselves after the king’s death, although Ives added a caveat: ‘[T]oo much can easily be built on the slim evidence of one letter’.
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There may indeed be less to this letter than meets the eye. In asking Dymmock to send him copies of the patents, Anthony may have simply been making sure his papers were in order. Furthermore, the ordinances concerning Edward V had been revised on 25 February 1483 by, it should be remembered, the king himself. The revised ordinances, instructing that the prince do nothing contrary to the advice of Alcock, Anthony, or Richard Grey, adressed the situation within the prince’s household and would not have suffered to protect Anthony against a threat from outside it. Despite a theory by certain partisans of Richard III that Anthony’s letter is evidence of a Woodville plot to poison Edward IV and seize power
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, the ordinances most certainly did not address who was to govern if Prince Edward became king; they covered the upbringing of a young prince, not a royal minority.

As for the patent allowing Anthony to raise troops, the date of its issuance by the king is unknown: Ives notes that such a patent was not enrolled in the royal records, and nothing in Anthony’s letter indicates the date of the patent. There were a couple of reasons, however, why Anthony might have wanted a copy of it. In December 1482, France and Burgundy had entered into the Treaty of Arras, which meant that Edward IV had lost his French pension and that his daughter Elizabeth had lost her promised marriage to the Dauphin of France. The news had infuriated the king, who in the parliament of 1483 obtained a subsidy for ‘the hasty and necessary defence of the realm’.
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While the king may not have intended a full-scale invasion of France, Anthony might have wished to be prepared for such a possibility. It is also noteworthy that the 1483 parliament confirmed an exchange of land made in 1479 between the Prince of Wales and William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, then the Earl of Pembroke. The transaction, which had conferred the Pembroke lands upon Prince Edward in exchange for manors in Somerset and Dorset, was initiated by the crown and was to Huntingdon’s disadvantage. Perhaps Anthony was anticipating trouble following Parliament’s confirmation of the exchange. The request that the documents be delivered by ‘some sure man’ – assuming this is not merely a catchphrase – need not be sinister.
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Given the tension between France and England, there were no doubt spies about who would have been interested in any preparation for war.

This brings us to Anthony’s transfer of his deputy constableship to Dorset. While the king is not mentioned by Anthony, there is no reason to suppose that he was unaware of this arrangement or disapproved of it; clearly, Lord Dudley knew what was going on. Perhaps Anthony’s intent was to allow his nephew, who had a large family that included a number of daughters to be married off, to enjoy the fees pertaining to the office. There are certainly no indications that Dorset made military use of his possession of the Tower in the days before or after the king’s death; the story that he seized the royal treasure stored there, as we shall see, cannot be substantiated.

Dorset had something else on his mind during the early part of 1483: the marriage of his eldest son to Anne St Leger, the king’s niece.
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Anne was the daughter of Edward IV’s sister Anne, Duchess of Exeter, and her second husband, Thomas St Leger. The duchess’s Lancastrian first husband, Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, had been imprisoned in the Tower after the Battle of Tewkesbury but had been released to join the 1475 expedition to France; on the way home, he drowned in what were considered suspicious circumstances. The duchess, however, had already been allowed to divorce Exeter, who had spent years in exile before the defeat at Tewkesbury, and marry St Leger. She had died in 1476, probably of complications from childbirth, soon after the birth of their daughter. Although the duke’s estates had been forfeited due to his support for the Lancastrian cause, most of them had been granted to the duchess in 1461, and St Leger had enjoyed them after the duchess’s death.