ALLEN LANE

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First published 2016

Copyright © A. J. Pollard, 2016

Cover design by Pentagram

Jacket art by Rosie McGuinness

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-97870-3

Contents

Picture Credits

Preface

Genealogical Table

EDWARD IV

1. A Notable Foundation of Hearsay

2. Son of York

3. This Fair White Rose

4. Winter of Discontent

5. Master of All His Foes

6. The Sun in Splendour

7. In Fear of No One

8. The End of Summer

Illustrations

Further Reading

Notes

Abbreviations

Follow Penguin

THE BEGINNING

Penguin Monarchs

THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

THE HOUSE OF STUART

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

For Scarlett

Preface

Edward IV was a usurper. In 1461, aged eighteen, he seized the throne from Henry VI during the course of the first and most fierce of the Wars of the Roses between his house and the house of Lancaster. His father, Richard, Duke of York, had claimed to be the legitimate king; Edward made good the claim with the sword. Edward struggled at first to hold on to power and was deposed in 1470. Six months later, in the spring of 1471, he dramatically recovered his crown. Uniquely among English monarchs, Edward IV had two reigns. After 1471 he appeared to have secured the throne for himself and his heirs. However, his early death in 1483 led rapidly to the collapse of his dynasty and its replacement by the Tudors. There have been few more dramatic stories in the history of the English monarchy than the rise and fall of the house of York.

Historians are divided as to whether Edward himself is to be blamed for the ultimate failure of his dynasty. Almost from the moment of his death alternative views were being expressed for and against him. Within twenty years a debate concerning the character of the man and the quality of his rule was established with which all subsequent historians have had to engage. This debate, set out in the first chapter, has not been as passionate as that surrounding his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, but it has likewise shaped and constrained the way his history is written. Modern judgements of him have ranged from an immoral hedonist and bloody tyrant to a hard-working exemplar of the ideal of a medieval monarch. Within this spectrum, he is in this book characterized nearer the former than the latter, as a ruler who rarely looked beyond the short term, his own close circle and his own immediate ends. Though capable of sustained attention to statecraft, especially in a crisis, as his reign progressed and he aged he became more addicted to self-indulgence. In several respects he was successful, but he failed to establish his dynasty. Yet ill-fortune also played a part. Had he lived for just four more years (he was not yet forty-one when he died in 1483), his elder son would have succeeded him without challenge. It is likely that Edward would then have been remembered as a successful monarch, possibly the founder of a great dynasty. As it is, today he hardly registers in the public imagination, overshadowed by his notorious brother Richard who took the throne for himself.

Edward deserves to be better known – for the drama of his life, his flamboyant personality and the way in which his reign witnessed a revival in royal authority completed by Henry VIII. I hope this brief account will bring him to a wider readership. I would like to thank Tom Penn for asking me to write the book. I have written several times in different contexts on the reign of Edward IV, but never before have I had the opportunity to make the man and monarch centre-stage. I have benefited over a lifetime from the research, assistance and advice of many fellow historians, too many to list, but I would particularly like to acknowledge my debt in this work to Charles Ross and Michael Hicks. I would also like to thank Tig Lang, Hugh Meller and Michael Stansfield for their help on particular matters and all the staff at Penguin in going to press. Finally, Sandra, thank you for your loving support during a difficult time while this book was being written.

The spelling of Middle English has been modernized in all quotations in the text.

Eryholme, December 2015

1

A Notable Foundation of Hearsay

Many people know that the winter of discontent was made glorious summer by the sun of York. Not so many are aware that the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III celebrate the resumption of the reign of Edward IV of York. Edward had been deposed in October 1470 and his predecessor, the Lancastrian Henry VI, restored. By one of the most remarkable reverses of fortune in English history, he recovered his throne six months later. Shakespeare starts the action at this moment of triumph in the spring of 1471, when the son of Richard of York, who used the sun as one of his badges, began his second reign.

Shakespeare did not devote a play in his history cycle to Edward IV, choosing to split his reign between Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III. His decision to some extent reflected a Tudor perception that Henry VI was the legitimate king until 1471, but also followed from his instinct that Richard III was a far more dramatic subject. In Henry VI Edward is a cruel, dishonest and duplicitous usurper, overshadowed by an heroic Warwick the Kingmaker. In Richard III he is a bit player upon the stage, now a sick and pliable king, largely irrelevant to the course of events being manipulated by his Machiavellian brother. This is a travesty. For it was only after 1471 that Edward was able to enjoy his hard-won crown and to rule much as he pleased. Assessment of Edward IV as a monarch largely depends on these later years. When he died in 1483 there seemed to be no threat to the peaceful succession of his son, another Edward, to the throne.

The opening lines of Richard III also echo the fact that the twelve years of Edward’s second reign came to be regarded as a short-lived golden age of ‘glorious summer’, before winter descended once again as a result of his brother Richard’s usurpation. One consequence is that these years can appear to be but a brief respite in the apparently relentless chaos of the Wars of the Roses that stretched from 1455 to beyond 1485. Because of this, as well as Shakespeare’s dramatic licence, Edward IV has tended to be a little-known king, dismissed in many traditional accounts as of only passing interest. This has been reinforced by the image of the monarch as a shallow playboy who preferred, in Shakespeare’s words, to caper ‘nimbly in a lady’s chamber’ to the ‘lascivious pleasing of a lute’ than to attend to the serious business of war and government.

Contemporaries and near-contemporaries were more positive. Two narratives in particular have endured: one by a cleric, a middle-ranking civil servant and member of Edward’s household who wrote the anonymous memoir for Crowland Abbey, the Lincolnshire monastery from which it took its name; the other by the Flemish courtier and diplomat Philippe de Commynes. Both were contemporaries of Edward and both had met him and were eyewitnesses to some events. Both set down their memoirs after Edward’s death – indeed, after the accession of Henry VII and the failure of the Yorkist dynasty. Thus, though written by contemporaries, they were composed with the benefit of hindsight and under later influences.

The Crowland author was an admirer of his ‘illustrious’ king, though not uncritical. He was somewhat in awe of him, praising him as a magnificent monarch, prudent and far-seeing, in full command of his kingdom in his later years. But he disapproved of his dissipated lifestyle, his financial exactions and his tyrannical tendencies at the end of his reign. Although some of this author’s judgements have been found wanting in the light of other evidence, he remains the best-informed, the fullest and most reliable source for the reign.¹

Commynes first served the Duke of Burgundy, the ruler of Flanders and the rest of the Low Countries, before transferring his loyalty, contentiously, to Burgundy’s rival and overlord, King Louis XI of France, in 1472. He never visited England though was in Calais, the remaining English possession in France, on several occasions, and received news and information from English diplomats, exiles and merchants. Commynes offered contradictory assessments of Edward. At one point in his memoirs he commented that he was not an outstanding man and at another he reported that Warwick considered him a little simple (‘a bit thick’?). Yet he also states that he was a very great and powerful king, fearing nobody after 1471. On one thing he was consistent: Edward was not to be compared in statecraft with his own king, Louis XI. A strikingly handsome man in his youth, Edward was more concerned with the pursuit of pleasure than the art of ruling and was more prone to random acts of cruelty than Louis.²

The two portraits are not far apart. On one matter both authors are in full-hearted agreement: Edward’s prowess on the field of battle and his outstanding success as a general. The crucial differences derive from their affiliation. They both admired the masters they had served and considered them distinguished monarchs. Thus Crowland saw Edward as one of the more successful English kings; Commynes considered him naïve and no match for the cunning Louis.

Several of the faults that Crowland and Commynes perceived in Edward are to be found also in the account given by Dominic Mancini, an Italian visitor resident in London in the summer of 1483, of how Richard III became king. It was composed before the end of that year, but lost until the twentieth century. It contains a pen portrait of Edward in his last months, drawing heavily on what was being said in London that summer; it repeats the view that, while affable, he was excessive in his womanizing, avaricious and too much in the grip of a faction.³ These criticisms derived from the charges against Edward’s regime made by Richard III at the time.

Richard III’s denigration of his brother to justify his usurpation of the throne in 1483 may also have influenced the memoirs written later by Crowland and Commynes. It is, of course, difficult to discern whether Richard III’s accusations were well founded or not: clever propagandists base their accounts on a modicum of truth. Because of this even the most immediate and apparently reliable of our narrative sources, which have shaped the way we see Edward IV, are problematic.

The first historians who wrote about Edward IV in the reign of Henry VIII, Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More, still in touch with contemporary memories, tended to confirm the view of Crowland. Vergil considered that Edward was an effective monarch, diligent as a ruler, affable, but regrettably avaricious and given over to bodily lust.⁴ Sir Thomas More’s portrait in his history of Richard III carries a panegyric of Edward who, despite his self-indulgence and ‘fleshly wantonness’, was courageous, just, merciful and wise, loved by his subjects, and ruled benignly over a peaceful and prosperous kingdom. Yet elsewhere in the work, in the mouth of Richard III’s ally the Duke of Buckingham, More reiterates criticism of the king for his avarice, his sexual excesses and his failure to control faction.⁵

There are other contemporary or near-contemporary sources, unearthed in subsequent centuries, that can flesh out the history. There are several narratives, chronicles and related accounts, such as versions of the London Chronicles and the chronicle known as the Brut, completed or continued in the 1460s, which are valuable for the events of 1459–61, though they reflect the Yorkist version.⁶ Two narratives composed in or after 1470–71 give a version of events from the victorious side.⁷ The main independent account is that written in about 1480 by John Warkworth which takes the narrative up to 1473.⁸

Also invaluable for details are diplomatic correspondence, private letters, aristocratic, urban and ecclesiastical archives and, above all, the public records of government. All these have been exploited intensively, especially in the last century, to amplify and deepen our knowledge and understanding of Edward IV and his reign.⁹ Yet collectively they have not affected significantly the overarching interpretations of the reign inherited from the first memoirs and histories. Sir Philip Sidney’s scathing judgement of the historian ‘loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorising himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay’ is not far off the mark.¹⁰

In Sidney’s time, the late sixteenth century, the positive evaluation of Edward IV waned. A view developed that Edward was an immoral, cruel and deceitful king solely driven by lust, avarice and casual cruelty (as reflected in Shakespeare).¹¹ By the mid nineteenth century he came to be represented as a despot, more vicious than any king since John and more cruel and bloodthirsty, whose rule was unconstitutional and arbitrary.¹² Edward IV was cast as a hinderer of democracy, a reactionary, laying the foundation for the absolute rule of Tudor despotism. A school textbook first published in 1909 summed him up: ‘He was one of the worst men who ever sat on the throne of England and his premature end was due to his evil living.’¹³

In the twentieth century some historians began once again to take a more positive view. Edward has now been praised as one of the greatest of English kings, a man who rescued his kingdom from a ‘shambles’ and left his dynasty secure on the throne; a king who came close to perfecting the medieval system of personal monarchy.¹⁴ However, not all are as impressed. On the contrary, ‘this heavy eating, heavy drinking and heavy whoring king’ lacked judgement, was complacent and largely ineffective as a monarch, failing to reunite his kingdom after civil war and allowing faction to flourish with disastrous results after his premature death.¹⁵ To some he was hard-working; possessed of ‘profound political ability’, of ‘iron will and great fixity of purpose’ beneath a shroud of ‘indolence and gaiety’; to others he was no more than the shroud itself: an ‘indolent, sensual and selfish hedonist’.¹⁶ As the number of works published about the later fifteenth century and Edward IV has expanded rapidly, especially in the last thirty years, so have all manner of variations between these different positions proliferated. However, all remain within the framework created in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, and are variations on the themes established then about the man and the monarch. Any modern life of Edward IV and history of his reign is inevitably both shaped and constrained by this tradition.