The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (35 page)

9. She was rumoured to have had lovers and gossip was rife, particularly when the
simple but saintly King, on being told of the birth of his heir, remarked that it
must have been through the agency of the Holy Ghost.

10. John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (1390–1453), was one of Henry V’s great
captains, the ‘English Hector’, of whom Hall reported, ‘the French to frighten
their young children cry “the Talbot commeth”’.

11.
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1452–1461
, p 36. (Hatclyf was a career civil servant who
was the ‘King’s Secretary’. He was paid 2 shillings per day on Edward’s French
expedition of 1475.)

12. The battle of Blore Heath in September 1459 was followed in October by a
Yorkist disaster at Ludford Bridge and the flight of the leaders.

13. Richard Neville became the Earl of Warwick through his wife Anne, daughter of
the great Harry Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and hero of the French wars. The
new Warwick was a man of energy, charm and pride. He took over the Captaincy
of Calais from Rivers who insisted the garrison be paid. With no cash Warwick
made his own arrangements by capturing five Lubeck ships with cargoes worth
£10,000 and driving a further 26 ships ashore. There were bitter complaints
from the owners and Rivers was appointed as the King’s investigator. He found
Warwick guilty. The
English Chronicle
is a contemporary record of the events.

14. Paston letter dated 28 January 1460, in
Paston Letters 1422–1509
, ed J. Gardner,
vol. 3, p 204.

15. The French put Lord Scales in the same class as Salisbury and Talbot (Jacques
Duclos,
Chroniques et Mémoires
, ed Buchon (Paris, 1865), vol. iii, p 308). He was
also recognized as ‘one of the strongest and bravest champions’ and actually
features as such in
Tirant Lo Blanc
, a novel written in Catalan by Joanot Martorell
who visited England in 1438 and wrote around 1460.

16.
An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI
, ed J.S.
Davies (London: Camden Society, 1856), p 96.

17. Lord Scales’s wealth in 1436 was assessed at £376 a year. See H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes
from Land in England in 1436’,
English Historical Review
, vol. 49 (1934), p 617.

18. Northampton in July 1460, Wakefield – where Duke Richard of York was killed
– in December 1460, Mortimer’s Cross and St Albans in February 1461. The
latter was a Lancastrian success which gave the Queen and her seven-year-old
son the chance to decide what form of death should be inflicted on the prisoners
and then watch the proceedings.

19. The population of England and Wales was then, perhaps, around 2.5 million;
now there are probably around 40 million people descended from indigenous
stock. A.W.G.Sykes has calculated that if you are mainly of English or Welsh
stock then the odds are on you having an ancestor who fought at Towton.
The
Battle of Towton
(Stroud: Sutton, 1994) by A.W. Boardman deals with the prelude,
battle and aftermath in detail.

20. Waurin,
Anciennes Chroniques
, vol. ii, p 326. King Edward reiterated to Commines,
Memoirs 1461–1483
(London, 1855), vol. iii, p 5, that this was his policy.

21. Edward issued a proclamation in English in March 1461 which started with a
recital of ‘the evils’ he intended to rectify. He lamented the loss of the overseas
territories, i.e. France, the decline in trade, oppression of his subjects, the
general state of lawlessness and corruption of justice which had all arisen
‘through the negligence, ambition, greed...of such as have ruled’. He referred
to ‘our adversary, he that calleth himself King Henry VI’ and went on savagely to
condemn such recent Lancastrian activities as terrorizing parts of the country,
plundering the churches, preying on defenceless women and killing people ‘in
such detestable wise and cruelness as hath not be heard done among [even] the
Saracins’ – a good example of an early political manifesto. The proclamation was
designed to be read in full and to sway public opinion. Previously proclamations
had been short statements in Latin which were translated into English locally
but this one was issued in full, in the vernacular, complete with supporting
arguments. For further detail on the royal propaganda of Edward see Alison
Allan, ‘Royal Propaganda of Edward IV’,
BlHR
, vol. lxix (1986), pp 146–55.

22.
Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Existing in the Archives and Collections of
Milan, I, 1385–1618
, ed A.B. Hinds (London: HMSO, 1913), p 102.

23.
Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward IV
, pp 81, 169–70.

24. Sir John Grey’s mother was Lady Ferrers of Groby, a peeress in her own right.
Though his father, Sir Edward Grey, had gained livery of his wife’s title, he had
died in December 1457. Lady Ferrers remarried (May 1462) a younger son of the
Earl of Essex and wanted all the money.

25. Waurin,
Anciennes Chroniques
, vol. ii, p 326.

26. G. Smith (ed),
The Coronation of Elizabeth Wydeville: Queen Consort of Edward IV on
26th May, 1465
(London, 1935).

27. There were 14 or 15 siblings; Elizabeth was the first and probably born in 1437.
Anthony was born in 1442, John in 1445, Richard about 1450. Walter Paston
was at Oxford with Lionel, whom he regarded as a contemporary, which would
make Lionel born in 1455. However, Professor Lander suggests that Lionel
was born in 1451 (
Crown and Nobility 1450–1509
(London, 1976), p 116) but a
papal dispensation refers to him being 29 in 1481, i.e. born in 1452 (
Calender of
Entries in the Papal Registers, 1471–1484
(London: HMSO, 1955), pp 744, 806).
Catherine was born in 1457, and there was a younger sister who is said to have
married Sir John Bromley. The creation of Knights of the Bath for the wedding is
a good indicator; the Duke of Buckingham was born in 1455, and Humphrey his
younger brother was probably born in 1457; both were knighted at the wedding.
Ten years later the Earl of Shrewsbury was knighted at the age of seven. If Edward
Woodville was too young to be knighted at the wedding in May 1465 then he
might have been born around 1458 or 1459, a date which also ties in with his
subsequent career.

28. The Master of ‘Henxmen’ was required ‘to show the schools of urbanity and
nurture of England, to learn them to ride cleanly and surely; to draw them also
to jousts; to learn them [to] wear their harness [armour]; to have all courtesy
in words, deeds, and degrees; diligently to keep them in rules of goings and
sittings. Moreover, to teach them sundry languages and other learning virtuous,
to [play the] harp, to pipe, sing, dance, with other honest temperate behaving;
and to keep daily and weekly with these children due convenites [lessons] with
corrections in their chambers according to such gentlemen.’ (Being of noble
birth henchmen were not beaten in public.) Such were the instructions in the
‘Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household’. Sir
John Fortescue, the political thinker of the day, wrote: ‘I look on it [the King’s
palace] as an academy for the young nobility of the Kingdom to inure and employ
themselves in robust and manly exercises, probity and a generous humanity.’

Chapter 3. Politics

1. Anthony was one of the commanders at the siege of Alnwick; the castle fell on 6
January 1463. Warwick’s younger bother, John Neville, Lord Montague, was in
overall charge and Lord Worcester was there as constable.

2.
Excerpta Historica
, ed Samuel Bentley (London, 1831), p 178.

3. The herald was ‘Nucélles Pursuivant’, who was rewarded by the Bastard with a
‘rich gown furred sable’ and a black velvet doublet with gold clasps. The Bastard
had taken 2,000 men crusading to redeem the pledge his father had made at the
Feast of the Pheasant in 1454; he sailed in May 1464 and helped raise the siege of
Ceuta, a Portuguese town on the North African coast. This was a great period for
bastards, who were regarded as more handsome and personable than legitimate
children. The four Valois Dukes of Burgundy produced 68, who formed a sort of
‘bastardocracy’ in the ducal administration.

4.
Paston Letters
, vol. ii, p 303.

5.
Excerpta Historica
, p 206.

6. Alwite or white was the term used for uncovered plate armour. Its origins are in
the term ‘blanca’ or bleaching, i.e. to whiten the metal, usually by treating with
an acid or coating with tin. (Incidentally, it is probably the origin of the name of
the ‘White Company’ of Sir John Hawkwood.)

7. A ‘made’ charger was always difficult to find. Most of the surviving fifteenth-
century letters about tournaments refer to borrowing horses. From the report
above it sounds as if it was the Bastard who had a problem with his charger, as
he must have riden or driven his horse into Anthony’s saddle and that probably
means it was his horse that had swerved out on the first run.

8. In a challange issued by Tirant Lo Blanc, he specifies ‘axes four-and-a-half feet
long without concealed advantage, swords with forty inch blades, and daggers
two feet long’. This was written in 1460 (
Tirant Lo Blanc
, p 109). The heads of
poleaxes in the Wallace Collection weigh around 5–6lbs (2.330–2.950kg).

9. Hans Talhoffer’s
Fechtbuch
of 1467 has 23 plates showing various movements
for axe fighting and over 200 drawings showing other close-quarter fighting
techniques. Talhoffer was one of many fencing masters; Paul Kal, a rival, lists
17 masters-of-arms belonging to the ‘Society of Liechtenauer’, named after a
celebrated tutor and the top rank for the profession.

10.
Excerpta Historica
, p 202.

11.
Ibid
., pp 208–9.

12. Comprehensive accounts of the marriage and subsequent festivities are recorded
by Olivier de la Marche (
Mémoires
, ed H. Beaune and J. d’Arbaumont (Paris:
Société de l’Histoire de France, 1883–88), vol. ii, pp 123–200). Sir John Paston
also wrote glowingly to his mother about the splendour of the arrangements.
Richard Barber provides a helpful view of the whole in
The Knight and Chivalry
,
pp 186–9.

13. G.D. Painter,
William Caxton
(Chatto & Windus, 1976), p 45. The engraving is in
a copy of
Recuyell of the Histories of Troy
that was once owned by Queen Elizabeth
(Woodville). The initials of Margaret and Duke Charles are on the canopy of the
bed with the motto
Bein en auiengne
(‘may good come of it’; it did not!); a lap dog
is held by one of five ladies in waiting; there is a pet monkey and courtiers in their
winkle-picker shoes.

14.
Excerpta Historica
, pp 240–5.

15. 4,000 marks is around £2,600 – comfortable but not generous. King Edward
had not put the estate at the level of earlier queens: both Margaret of Anjou and
Katherine (Valois) had been awarded 10,000 marks (£6,600) a year.

16. Margaret married the heir to the Earl of Arundel; Anne married the heir to the
Earl of Essex; Eleanor married the heir to the Earl of Kent; Catherine the Duke
of Buckingham and Mary the eldest son of Lord Herbert.

17. Young men coupling with older women seems not to have been out of the
ordinary in the fifteenth century. In
Tirant Lo Blanc
, the page, a minor hero,
has an affair with the empress, who is – she observes – ‘old enough to be your
grandmother’. The page retorts, ‘My lady, this is no time for idle chatter. Lead
me to your bed where we shall find both solace and delight.’

18.
The Great Chronicle of London
, ed A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (1938), p 208.

19. G.H. Orpen, ‘Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland, 1-2 Edward IV’,
English
Hitorical Review
, 30 (1915), pp 342–3.

20. The Council consisted of the great noblemen and principal bishops together with
some powerful peers, clerics and Council officials. Up to 60 strong, there were
never more than 20 at a meeting and usually far fewer. Between 1461 and 1485
the Council met, on average, more than once a week.

21. There are two obvious Woodville tombs in Grafton church, one just a solid
medieval stone box stripped of its carvings; it is supposed to be Sir Richard’s
grandfather, also a Sir Richard. The other is still rich in detail; on the top is
a deeply engraved picture of a knight in full plate armour, sword and dagger,
long pointed feet, open helmet and a face with a long drooping moustache. The
lettering round the edge states this was ‘John Wydeiul’ but sadly the marble is
rather battered and covered in graffiti, so the rest is illegible. However, he is
probably an earlier Woodville, perhaps the Sir John who lengthened the church
and added the tower.