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  “Sire, you must rise and come to see my brother of Warwick,” said the archbishop, “nor do I think you can refuse.”

  Edward was escorted by his “rescuers” to Middleham Castle which was Warwick’s main stronghold. The earl was savouring his greatest triumph, he held King Edward a captive while in London King Henry was locked in the Tower, and it seemed that he was in a position to bestow the crown on his eager son.-in-law. But first he had his revenge; the queen’s father Lord Rivers and her brother Sir John knelt before his headsman, as did other supporters of Edward and the Woodvilles. These summary executions, rushed through without the pretence of legal hearings, lost Warwick the support of the people. They had been ready to side with him when he declared that he was going to reform the realm, now they saw him behaving with a brutal arrogance which contrasted ill with Edward’s good-humoured, larger-than-life character or even poor Henry’s Christian piety.

  In London the citizens rioted in protest and the Duke of Burgundy offered to come to their aid if they would support King Edward; on the Scottish border the Lancastrians seized the opportunity to raise a Red Rose rebellion. When Warwick called for men to suppress it there was no response. It was clear that now if was only King Edward whom men would follow and Warwick realised that he had overplayed his hand. Without popular support even the King-Maker was powerless to control the kingdom.

  Always a realist, Warwick knew that if he continued to hold Edward it would only increase the feeling which was running against him, therefore he freed the king in what a chronicler described as “a manner almost miraculous and beyond all expectation.” Almost immediately Warwick’s popularity began to return; men hurried to follow his banner against the Lancastrian rebels. He soon put down the insurrection for Edward and underlined his success by bringing back the leaders for execution at York. By the end of the year Warwick and Clarence had regained enough confidence to return to the court in London where it appeared that the events of the summer had been conveniently forgotten. With the kingdom still restless the king and the earl needed each other, Warwick had learned that his power still depended on royal authority while Edward still required the support of the most powerful noble in England. Their reconciliation was cemented by Warwick’s nephew and heir being created Duke of Bedford and betrothed to Edward’s infant daughter. Sir John Paston wrote to his mother: “The King hath good language of the Lords of Clarence and Warwick, and of my Lords of York (Archbishop Neville) and Oxford saying they be his best friends, but his household men have other language, so that what shall hastily fall I cannot say.”

  Clarence may have gained Isabel as a result of the past intrigue but having been so tantalisingly close to the crown left him in a fever of discontent. His only consolation must have been that secretly proud Warwick felt the same — he desperately needed to prove that he was the real master of the realm. So the conspiracies continued. According to the Chronicle of the White Rose, when Archbishop Neville invited Edward to Moor Park, “a little before supper, when they should have washed, John Ratcliffe warned the King privily and bade him beware for there were ordained privily an hundred of arms the which should take him and carry him out of the way. Whereupon the King, feigning to make his water, caused a good horse to be saddled, and so with a small company rode to Windsor.”

  Early in 1470 a rebellion broke out in Lincolnshire and before the king set out with his army Clarence joined him in St Paul’s to pray for the success of the expedition. Clarence seemed so concerned for his elder brother that on March 8 a letter reached Edward offering to bring Warwick to his aid. In reply Clarence and Warwick were authorised to raise troops on the king’s behalf. It was only when Edward attacked the insurgents at the village of Empingham, five miles from Stamford, that he became aware of his brother’s renewed treachery.

  In the heat of the fight some of the rebels forgot political caution and automatically gave voice to their usual battle cries, “A Clarence! A Warwick!” When they had been defeated by the royal troops documents were found which proved that Clarence and Warwick had planned the rising “to destroy the King and to have made the said duke King.”

  Edward dispatched the Garter King of Arms to Coventry, where Clarence and Warwick were waiting with the demand that they dismiss their troops and come to him. They agreed, but having done so led their armies north. Again Edward called upon them to disband and present themselves before him; they demanded safe conduct and full pardons for their men. At this the king decided to attack, whereupon they retreated to Dartmouth from which they escaped to Honfleur.

  The king’s hardening attitude to the traitors can be judged by the revolting fate meted out to those supporters who had the misfortune to be captured. The Earl of Worcester earned the epithet of the Butcher of England when he ordered them to be impaled — a lingering form of execution which he introduced to the country.

  * * *

  King Louis of France gave the fugitives a warm welcome; enemies of Edward were friends of his, and he hoped their arrival heralded trouble for England. He was not disappointed when Warwick confided in him his latest scheme, though he was probably amazed at his guest’s audacity. If anyone was going to be disappointed it would be Clarence.

  Through Louis Warwick arranged to visit Queen Margaret at Angers in July 1470 and what an extraordinary meeting it must have been — she had ordered the execution of Warwick’s father, he had deprived her husband of his throne and twice had driven her out of England. Remembering the harm the earl had done to her and her friends she was loath to listen at first, but persistently he explained that now he wished to restore Henry to the throne. The new alliance would be cemented by the marriage of her son Prince Edward to his daughter Anne — the girl with whom Richard of Gloucester was in love.

  Gradually Margaret allowed herself to be persuaded; much as she detested Warwick he represented her only chance of ever obtaining power again. Finally when he went on his knees before her, swearing fidelity, she kept him in this uncomfortable and humiliating position for nearly twenty minutes before she consented to his pleas. On July 25 Prince Edward was betrothed to Anne Neville and five days later Warwick swore on a fragment of the True Cross to be faithful to King Henry.

  Although Warwick tried to placate Clarence by promising him the Duchy of York, and the succession should Prince Edward have no issue, it was the crown that the duke had wanted. His dream evaporated as he watched Warwick planning to get control of England through a Lancastrian rather than a Yorkist king. He burned with hidden resentment when he and the King-Maker set sail on September 9 with an army and fleet provided by King Louis.

  In England the Lancastrians proved to be as pragmatic as Queen Margaret; they flocked to the standard of their old enemy. There were also many other Englishmen who, becoming disillusioned with Yorkist rule after the atrocities committed under the Earl of Worcester, had no objection to seeing Henry back on the throne.

  King Edward had yet again been lured from the capital to deal with a northern insurrection organised by Lord Fitzburgh, Warwick’s brother-in-law.

  “He had left the Queen, great with child, in the Tower of London,” recorded the Chronicle of the White Rose. “But in the north country as he lay in his bed the sergeant of his minstrels came to him in haste and bade arise for he had enemies coming to take him, the which were within six or seven miles.”

  With his brother Richard of Gloucester he rode to Lynn where he hired three ships to carry his men to Flanders. The escape had been so sudden that the king was without money and he gave the captain his gown lined with marten fur as payment.

  In London the bewildered Henry VI suddenly found his old enemy Warwick kneeling before him, then cheers rang in his ears as he was escorted to the Palace of Westminster and soon afterwards he felt the weight of the crown in a second coronation ceremony.

  The mob cheered louder when Worcester, the Butcher of England, was sentenced to walk from Westminster to the execution ground on Tower Hill. Such was their hatred of him that they
tried to lynch him on the way and he had to be sheltered in the Fleet Prison. He is one of the minor enigmas of history, for it is hard to equate the impaling of prisoners with this polished gentleman who had graduated from Oxford and Padua, had been Caxton’s patron and was a Greek scholar and author. When on the scaffold he was upbraided for his cruelty he retorted that he had only been harsh in the service of the state; then he turned to the headsman and coolly asked him to use three blows, one for each member of the Trinity.

  With Henry on the throne, Warwick back in power and Worcester punished it seemed that all concerned in the coup were satisfied — except the Duke of Clarence.

  * * *

  On November 1 in the sanctuary of Westminster Queen Elizabeth gave birth to a son whom she named after his father. This meant that both rival kings now had heirs. Soon afterwards Queen Margaret, seeing that Warwick had fulfilled his promise to restore King Henry, kept hers and on December 13 Prince Edward was married to Anne Neville at Amboise. The queen put off returning to England until the spring as, like most travellers, she feared the winter weather in the Channel.

  Also waiting for a safe crossing was Edward. As Louis of .France had supported Clarence and Warwick, so the Duke of Burgundy assisted the fugitive king. On March 11 he set sail from Flushing with fifteen hundred men in a small fleet of ships which had been hired for him by the duke. It seemed a forlorn hope, yet Edward knew he had one secret ally, his mother and sisters had arranged a reconciliation between him and his brother Clarence.

  After landing at Ravenspur Edward declared that he had merely come to claim his duchy of York, and he entered the city hurrahing for King Henry. This ruse satisfied the citizens as it demonstrated that they were not traitors to Henry when they opened the gates to Edward’s troops. From York he marched towards Coventry where Warwick waited confidently within the city walls. Such was Edward’s magnetism that more and more began to follow his sun-in-splendour standard.

  Warwick was confident because he had a superior force and the Duke of Clarence had promised to bring him four thousand reinforcements which he had levied in the name of King Henry. Clarence had urged his father-in-law not to attack Edward until he arrived to help him, and this delay became a vital factor in Warwick’s defeat as it prevented him attacking Edward while he still had the advantage of numbers. When Clarence finally approached from the southwest Warwick’s plan to crush Edward between the two Lancastrian armies failed — for the simple reason that Clarence marched the men, their Lancastrian emblems hastily covered by those of the White Rose, into his brother’s camp.

  Edward and Clarence met on the Banbury road on April 3 when Clarence fell on his knees to his brother who raised him to a fanfare of trumpets while Richard of Gloucester looked on approvingly at the reunion. Thanks to Clarence’s betrayal of Warwick, Edward was now confident to march on London. Leaving the earl fuming in Coventry, he entered the capital to an enthusiastic welcome on April 14.

  “Three causes led to his welcome,” wrote De Commines. “He owed many debts there, he had many mistresses among the citizens’ wives and the Queen had just borne him a son.”

  News came that Warwick had left Coventry and was marching to join up with Lancastrian forces in the south, and Edward knew that it was essential to defeat him before this happened. He led an army of ten thousand to Barnet where, on a foggy Easter Sunday, he confronted the man who had done so much to win him the throne.

  Richard of Gloucester, then aged eighteen, was given command of the Yorkist’s right wing and although Clarence was present at the battle Edward placed the duke’s troops in the centre under his own command to make sure that his brother did not switch sides again.

  At first success seemed to favour Warwick; the Earl of Oxford attacked the Yorkist left wing so effectively that he pursued the fleeing White Rose troops all the way to Barnet town. But when he marched back to the battlefield veils of mist caused the Lancastrians to mistake his star emblem for Edward’s sun-in-splendour and immediately the fatal cry of “Treachery!” was raised. Panic spread and the Lancastrians fled. The Earl of Warwick, hampered by heavy armour, tried to reach his horse but, having been wounded, he stumbled and fell. Despite Edward’s order that he was not to be harmed, his vizor was prised open and he was stabbed to death.

  All that remained was for Queen Margaret’s army to be defeated, and Clarence played his part in this at Tewkesbury. Polydor Vergil described him joining with Gloucester and Hastings in the cold-blooded murder of Queen Margaret’s son Edward after the battle. Holinshed elaborated on this, writing that Edward was taken before the king after the battle and asked why he had come to England. The youth replied that he had come to recover his father’s heritage “at which words King Edward said nothing but with his hand thrust him from him, or (as some saie) struke him with his gantlet, whome incontinentlie George, Duke of Clarence, Richard, Duke of Glocester, Thomas Graie, marques of Dorset and William, Lord Hastings, that stood by, suddenlie murthered.” The only contemporary reference to Edward’s death is Warkworth’s statement that he “cried for succour” to Clarence.

  * * *

  Following the murder of Henry VI England began to settle down under the rule of Edward, and Clarence had to resign himself to the fact that he would never feel the weight of a crown, yet ambition and intrigue were second nature to him and it was not long before he was at odds with his younger brother. In appreciation for his military services Edward bestowed the late Warwick’s Yorkshire and Cumbrian estates upon Richard and agreed to his request to marry Warwick’s daughter Anne Neville, the widow of Prince Edward and co-heiress to her mother’s vast domains. Clarence, being married to her elder sister, had no intention of sharing these lands with his younger brother. Claiming Anne as his ward he carried her off and when King Edward commanded him to surrender her to Richard he hid her in a house in London “disguised in the habit of a workmaid”.

  After some time Richard managed to locate her and, after a romantic scene, placed her in sanctuary at St Martin le Grand. Then the two brothers argued their case in person before the king in council “with a skill and pertinacity which astounded the lawyers.”

  In February 1472 Clarence reluctantly agreed to the match in return for Richard’s office of Great Chamberlain, together with the title of Earl of Warwick and Salisbury, but he could not forgive Richard for having won the girl he loved. Sir John Paston wrote: “It is said for certain that the Duke of Clarence maketh him big in that he can, showing as he would deal with the Duke of Gloucester;-but the King intendeth in eschewing all inconvenience, to be as big as they both, and to be a stiffler between them.”

  Discord between Clarence and the king became evident again after the death of his wife Isabel in December 1476. A fortnight later Charles the Bold of Burgundy died, leaving his daughter mistress of his vast dominion.

  His territorial ambitions reawakened at the thought of gaining Europe’s greatest duchy, Clarence sought to renew his old suit with Mary until Edward forbade it, explaining that politically it would cause difficulties — but this did not stop Queen Elizabeth pressing the claims of her brother Anthony. Clarence suspected that the queen had been responsible for getting the king to veto the match, a suspicion which appeared to be confirmed when Edward presented Anthony as the official suitor for the Burgundian heiress.

  Clarence sought to revenge himself against the queen and her upstart family by discrediting them with the people. To this end he went to ruthless and bizarre lengths. He ordered the arrest without warrant of one of his late wife’s attendants named Ankarette, widow of Roger Twynho, for having brought about her mistress’ death by “a venymous drynke of ale myxt with poyson” — the implication being that the murder had been committed at the instigation of the queen. The unfortunate woman was hurried to Warwick where she was condemned by the justices in Petty Sessions and hanged in the presence of Clarence. A writ of certiorani — A writ from a higher court for records of a case tried in a lower. was issued but it came too late to save h
er from this judicial murder. Executed with her was a man whom Warwick had accused of poisoning his infant son.

  The Woodvilles were not slow to repay Clarence in his own coin by arranging the arrest of an Oxford clerk named John Stacy, who was reputed to be a wizard. Under torture he denounced one Thomas Burdet, a member of Clarence’s household, for practising witchcraft.

  On May 17 1477, the men were examined by a special commission at Westminster. Burdet was charged with having “composed the death of the king” in April 1474; with encouraging Stacy and another necromancer to “calculate and work out the Nativities of the King and the Prince of Wales”, with predicting Edward’s death and circulating treasonable rhymes. Found guilty, Burdet and Stacy were hanged at Tyburn on May 10.

  It would seem that Clarence’s anger deprived him of his last remaining shreds of caution. After the execution he burst into a meeting of the Council with Dr William Goddard to testify that Burdet and Stacy had protested their innocence right up to the moment of death. This was an unfortunate move as it was the same Dr Goddard who had preached at St Paul’s on King Henry’s right to the crown. Then, as though overcome by madness, Clarence followed this by declaring that the king was a bastard and a sorcerer. Edward responded by having him imprisoned until January 1478, when he was charged before Parliament with slandering the sovereign, making preparations for a new rebellion and sending his son secretly to Ireland after replacing him with a substitute at Warwick Castle.