The Last Knight Errant: Sir Edward Woodville & the Age of Chivalry (7 page)

Matters of foreign policy may have been the reason for the King’s visit, as Elizabeth’s mother had powerful relations at the Burgundian court. There is a less convincing view that King Edward came accidentally to the house after hunting but, whatever the reason, it is clear that the 22-year-old monarch had heard about the beautiful girl.

She was a penniless widow with two small children who had recently asked Lord Hastings, one of the King’s cronies, for his help in a court case against her avaricious mother-in-law. Hastings had taken full advantage of the situation and contracted to use his influence on her behalf.2 He also told the King about her. It sounded a good opportunity and so the young King, a great womanizer and ‘licentious in the extreme’, came to see for himself. Elizabeth was certainly beautiful and predictably took the opportunity of appealing ‘that she might be restored unto such small lands as her late husband had given her in jointure’. She must have been quite enchanting:

The King was moved to love her by reason of her beautiful person and elegant manner. But neither his fits nor his threats could prevail against her jealously guarded virtue. When Edward held a dagger to her throat in an attempt to make her submit to his passion, she held still and showed no sign of fear, preferring rather to die than live unchastely with the King. This incident only fanned the flames of Edward’s desire. He judged her worthy to be a queen whose virtue could withstand the approaches of even a royal lover.

So reported Dominic Mancini, an Italian cleric visiting England in 1483, who was providing political intelligence for his master in France.

Apart from his lack of success with Elizabeth, the King had other pressing problems: rebellion in the north and an empty exchequer. Reacting to the emergency, he postponed the opening of parliament, sold royal jewels, borrowed money, sent his artillery on and, summoning troops to meet him at Leicester, rode out from London on 28 April 1464.

At Stony Stratford he paused, told the court he was going hunting and rode the four miles over to Grafton. There he married Elizabeth on 1 May 1464 at a service in the little chantry at Grafton which was held in the presence of her mother, four or five others ‘and a young man who helped the priest to sing’. Afterwards King Edward took his new wife straight to bed. When he eventually reappeared at his court he told them he was exhausted from ‘hunting’ and went to his official bed.3

He went hunting for the next two days and then rode off to run his war. It was the first time an English king had married for love or lust4 and it remained secret until four months later when the matter of finding a ‘befitting bride’ for the King was raised at a meeting of the Great Council. ‘Perchance our choice may not be to the liking of everyone present,’ replied the King, adding, ‘nevertheless we will do as it likes us.’ 5 He then declared that he had married Elizabeth Woodville. The Council was horrified. Not only did they regard it as the loss of a strategic opportunity but also as most unsuitable.

The King may have argued that it was better to have an English bride than a foreign one; that her mother was sister to the Count de St Pol, descended from great men such as Simon de Montfort and had been wedded to the much admired Duke of Bedford; or that the heroic Black Prince had married a divorcee with five children. It would not have made any difference. The Council knew that Elizabeth had neither land nor money, was five years older than the King and that her father’s family were not even proper nobles. They were promoted gentry who had risen with little more than courage, ability and good looks. Rather more importantly it meant giving up the opportunity of a useful diplomatic marriage. Nevertheless this marriage was to shape Edward Woodville’s life.

The last 30 years had been an exciting time for nobles and knights, with wars in France and then war at home. Edward’s father, Sir Richard Woodville, had been a captain in the French wars under the great Duke of Bedford and then, in the campaign following the Duke’s death in 1435, he had fallen in love with Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the Duke’s young widow. She was 20 years old, ‘handsome and lively’, recently appointed a ‘Lady of the Order of the Garter’ and a rare good match for a mere professional soldier. Her marriage to Bedford had been diplomatic, so she was available for love and came with an inheritance of one-third of his English income of £4,000 a year, together with the share of his huge estates in France.

Sir Richard moved fast and married the young Duchess before anyone thought to stop them, although she was later fined 1,000 marks (about £666) for failing to procure royal consent.6 The 15-year-old King Henry VI was understanding and pardoned them after six months, but Jacquetta’s smart relations in Burgundy were horrified at the misalliance. It mattered little to them that Sir Richard was regarded as the handsomest man in England, or that he was an accomplished knight and a brave captain who made a career fighting the French and whose special interest was taking part in tournaments.7 However, it was as an able military commander that he was recognized in England and raised to the peerage in 1448 as Baron Rivers,8 ‘for his valour, integrity and great services’ in the French wars. He was later elevated to the Order of the Garter and appointed to the Privy Council.

At the time, England was sinking into chaos. King Henry was mentally unstable (inherited through his mother from King Charles VI of France) and many people regarded his powerful Queen, Margaret, as a frightful woman from Anjou, particularly after 1457 when one of her French friends amused himself by burning Sandwich.9 English possessions in France had fallen like ninepins and there was no general of Bedford’s standing or calibre to stop the collapse. The French had recently discovered how to use cannon against castles and the brothers Bureau established a great train of artillery with which they blasted the English out of their castles in Normandy and Guienne.

The 63-year-old Talbot10 tried to re-establish English supremacy but was killed at the battle of Castillon in 1453. He had 2,500 men and decided to attack a French army of 10,000 that was dug into a defensive position with cannon. Bordeaux fell to the French soon after (as Constantinople was falling to the Turks). The hard men in the front line were fighting a losing, unpaid war while covetous noblemen and sycophants ruled at court.

Debts were mounting, administration was falling apart and there was no money in the Treasury. There was an imaginative offer to use alchemy to make money, which William Hatclyf, the King’s secretary, was appointed ‘to investigate touching the means proposed to the king, whereby within a few years, his debts may be paid in good money of gold and silver’. Unfortunately it came to nothing and the country plunged further into debt.11

In one of the King’s mad spells Richard, Duke of York, whose blood claim to the throne was arguably stronger than Henry’s, had been appointed Protector (1454) and then, while suspicion, sedition and skirmishing engaged the great men of the land, Richard thought he would take advantage of the King’s madness. He tried to usurp the throne and so triggered the ‘Wars of the Roses’, or ‘the Cousins’ War’ as it was then known.

Edward Woodville was born some time around then and the Cousins’ War was to last intermittently for his lifetime. His father, Sir Richard, now Lord Rivers, was one of those summoned to the Great Council of 1458 which attempted a reconciliation between the rival factions. It proved impossible. A campaign ensued,12 which culminated in the Duke of York withdrawing to Ireland with his son, Edward, Earl of March, who then moved on to Calais, where their cousin and ally, the Earl of Warwick, controlled its garrison of around 2,000 men.

For the King, Lord Rivers was sent to assemble an expeditionary force at Sandwich, and his 18-year-old son, Anthony, Edward’s eldest brother, went with him. However, the Yorkist Earls, March and Warwick, took the initiative and on the night of 15 January 1460 sent a raiding party across the Channel. The Woodvilles, both father and son, were surprised in their beds and carried off to Calais as prisoners.

The Earl of Warwick clearly had a sense of theatre, for the Woodvilles were brought at night ‘before the Lords with eight score torches’ and bitterly ‘berated’ for their ‘upstart insolence’. It was the recent attainder which really rankled; the Yorkists had been, in absentia, convicted of treason by the King’s Council, of which Rivers was a member. Not only was the mighty Earl furious at the attainder but was also deeply insulted at being found guilty of piracy by a royal investigator. To rub salt in the wound, that investigator had been Lord Rivers.13

In the huge Gothic hall at Calais in the flickering torch light, Warwick contemptuously reminded Rivers that he had been ‘made by marriage and also made a Lord’ and ‘it was not his part to have such language of Lords’.14 History does not relate whether the Woodvilles stood in silence or answered back; they might well have made some pithy remarks about Yorkists getting above their station and Warwick’s title coming from his wife.

Somehow the Woodvilles escaped from Calais and were back in England when, on 26 June, the Earls of March and Warwick returned in vengeance with 2,000 men. The King and court retreated north, leaving Thomas, Lord Scales, ‘a man of violent passion’ who also happened to be Edward of March’s godfather, in command of the Tower and keeping an eye on Yorkist-leaning Londoners.

Scales had fought in every campaign against the French15 and was a firm establishment man with no sympathy for Yorkists, or for Londoners, all of whom he regarded as treacherous. They were besieging him! Believing the rebels would be speedily dealt with and with relief imminent, he unwisely bombarded the City. ‘They that were within the Tower cast wild fire [medieval napalm] into the city and shot in small guns, and burned and hurt men and women and children in the street. And they of London laid great bombards [cannons] on the further side of the Thames against the Tower and crashed the walls in divers places.’ 16

But Scales had miscalculated. The King did not come to the rescue because the royal army had been soundly defeated at Northampton, rations had run out and he was obliged to surrender on 19 July. The Yorkist earls let the choleric baron slip away upriver towards sanctuary but his luck ran out when he was recognized by the boatmen. They killed him and left his body – covered in stab wounds – in the churchyard of St Mary Overy.

His heiress was his only surviving child, Elizabeth, whom Anthony Woodville married six days after the killing (her mother and Anthony’s mother were friends). There had been a son, Thomas, but he was killed in single combat at the age of 15, so Elizabeth inherited wide estates and Middleton, a grand moated manor near King’s Lynn.17 Today’s visitor can still see the gatehouse, a four-storeyed symmetrical tower topped with corner turrets, rising proudly from the still waters of the moat.

The fighting went on, with battles at Wakefield, Mortimer’s Cross and, again, at St Albans.18 Duke Richard of York had been killed early in the increasingly bitter campaign that culminated in the dreadful dawn-to-dusk battle of Towton on Palm Sunday (29 March 1461). The Lancastrians were drawn up in a good defensive position but on a very exposed ridge facing south and looking straight into a blizzard. Anthony was in the vanguard with his father who was commanding 6,000 Welshmen.

The battle started with an archery exchange in which the Yorkists had the advantage of a strong wind. The Lancastrians were forced to advance from their position; Jean de Warin described Rivers and Somerset initiating a twobattle (or division) attack on the Yorkist line. They advanced steadily, cheering and shouting ‘King Henry’. The armies clashed together. It seems Rivers’s ‘battle’ won through and, thinking they were part of a successful advance, chased the Yorkists they had been fighting for several miles. In the blizzard no one could really see what was happening and those who remained battered away at each other. The Lancastrians were doing well until the arrival of fresh Yorkist troops, which turned the tables. Retreat turned into rout and then grim slaughter.

In this, the biggest and bloodiest battle of the Wars of the Roses, the build up of hatred seems to have negated the conventional rules of war. Each army probably started around 25,000 strong, rather than the more usual 5,000 to 10,000, but casualties were recorded by the heralds as 28,000 slain, ‘a number unheard of in our realm for almost a thousand years’, commented the Bishop of Salisbury. The Milanese ambassador reported a split of 8,000 Yorkists to 20,000 Lancastrians. Whatever the true figure, the casualties were certainly awful.19

Anthony, ‘recently made Lord Scales’, was reported dead. But both he and his father had in fact miraculously survived both the bitter fighting and the subsequent mopping-up operations, probably because they were still chasing Yorkists when disaster hit the Lancastrians.

Edward of March, commanding the Yorkists in place of his dead father, had issued orders: ‘Kill the nobles, leave the commoners’.20 This was not conventional. Throughout the Middle Ages you took prisoners and made good money on the ransom, so while death might be accidental it would not be by intent. However, in this civil war each side regarded themselves as legitimate and the other as illegitimate. The opposition would one day be attainted and therefore would have no property rights from which ransom could be paid. They might as well be killed and, anyway, dead rebels will not rebel again.

The battle of Towton established Edward of March as king. He was very handsome and tall and led his army on foot, from the front, ‘where with great violence he beat and bare down afore him all that stood in his way’. His skeleton has been measured and he was found to be 6ft 4ins (192cm) tall.

He immediately embarked on a campaign for hearts and minds. Well aware of the importance of public opinion, he was the first king properly to issue proclamations in English rather than Latin.21 His proclamation of March 1461 is seminal in the development of England’s rulers engaging the public; it heralded a control of news that gave him and his successors the capacity to present events in a particular light. He also ran a reconciliation programme for Lancastrian notables, with men such as Rivers, who was military rather than political, being a prime target.