The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (16 page)

Whatever the nature of his feelings for his deceased wife, Anthony would soon have a new responsibility to divert his thoughts: the care of his nephew, Prince Edward, the king’s oldest son.
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Anthony had played an important role in his young nephew’s life from the very beginning. Edward made his son Prince of Wales on 26 June 1471.
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That same year, the king appointed a fifteen-member council for his son, of which both the queen and Anthony were members. In February 1473, Edward IV added ten more members, a number with ties to the Woodville family, to the council.
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The king took an even more important step later that spring. Unrest in Wales led him to determine to establish a household for his son at Ludlow, where the king himself had spent time as a child. He sent his wife, by now showing the signs of another pregnancy, to get young Edward settled in his new lodgings. By 2 April 1473, Elizabeth and her son were established in Wales but were expected to join the king at Leicester for Easter.
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It was in this household at Ludlow that Anthony would spend much of the rest of his life.

Edward IV issued ordinances committing his heir to Anthony’s care on 27 September 1473.
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The ordinances governed the daily life of the prince from when he rose in the morning ‘at a convenient hour according to his age’ to when he went to bed at eight o’clock, at which time his attendants were to make him ‘joyous and merry towards his bed’. No one was to enter the prince’s chamber except for Anthony, the prince’s chamberlain, and his chaplains, or such other persons as Anthony thought proper. Anthony also had control over who was to sit at the prince’s board at mealtimes. When the prince’s revenues were brought to Ludlow, they were to be locked in a chest to which only three people had keys: the queen, Anthony, and John Alcock, Bishop of Rochester. Anthony and the bishop also had the authority to move the prince from place to place as was convenient for the season.

On 10 November 1473, the king appointed Anthony as ‘governor’ and ‘ruler’ of the prince and Alcock as his ‘teacher’ and president of his council. Nicholas Orme notes that the titles ‘governor’ and ‘ruler’ were new, although the function was not; the older term was ‘master’, which by this time was becoming associated with schoolmasters, who were lower down on the social scale. Likewise, Orme notes, the term ‘teacher’ was also new, although Alcock’s true function was likely to rule the prince’s household rather than to attend personally to his lessons, a task he delegated to others.

Anthony, as D.E. Lowe has pointed out, was well suited to his role as governor. Described by Mancini as one who had been ‘always considered a kind, serious, and just man, and one tested by every vicissitude of life’, he was also as adept at looking out for his own interests as any other fifteenth-century nobleman and was not overly fussed with legal niceties.
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His letters to his agent show him looking around for weaknesses in others’ title to land that could be exploited, and in his will, he felt the need to ask that the widowed Lady Willoughby be recompensed for his servants’ seizure of her goods. In 1465, in exchange for a pardon to her husband, the Lancastrian Gervase Clifton, this lady had been required to grant him lands to the value of 400 marks per year amounting to a whopping 80 per cent of her inheritance. Not surprisingly, Clifton had supported Henry VI in 1470–71 and had been executed after the Battle of Tewkesbury.
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But we can admit Anthony’s occasional capacity for ruthlessless without going so far as to say, with Michael Hicks, that ‘far from doing harm to no-one […] there was nobody he hesitated to harm’.
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D.E. Lowe’s assessment is far more balanced:

    a powerful personality – a predatory magnate rather than a mere courtier or dilettante patron of the arts – exercising a personal authoritative supervision over the conduct of his officials and the management of his affairs, with a keen grasp of detail and jealous to maintain his rights, real or imagined, against others, and resolved to exploit his assets to their fullest advantage.
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Anthony’s new responsibilities did not mean that he would spend the rest of the prince’s youth at Ludlow. In 1474, King Edward had made a pact with his brother-in-law, Charles, Duke of Burgundy, to invade France before 1 July 1475 – an essential undertaking for an English king. In April 1475, Anthony and Richard Martyn were sent on an embassy to Charles, who despite having agreed to aid in the invasion was preoccupied with the siege of Neuss as part of his attempt to gain control of Cologne. Their mission, to persuade Charles to give up his siege and turn his attention to the invasion, was unsuccessful. Having assembled a large force at enormous cost, Edward had no choice but to carry out his plan, Charles or no Charles.
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The English nobility was very well represented on the expedition, and Anthony was no exception. He raised a force of two knights, forty men at arms, and two hundred archers. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, brought ten knights and the same number of men at arms and archers. William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, likewise brought forty men at arms and two hundred archers, but no knights. The king’s brothers, the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, each raised a force of ten knights, one hundred men at arms, and a thousand archers. Also joining the expedition was Elizabeth’s eldest son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, who had been made the Marquis of Dorset on 18 April 1475.
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Back on the home front, the young Prince of Wales was appointed ‘keeper of the realm’ and was brought to London to join the queen.

Though Edward had prepared for the eventuality of being crowned King of France by having a suitable robe made, the expedition, which set off for Calais on 4 July 1475, ended anticlimactically, if profitably. Charles of Burgundy, having been forced to abandon Neuss by a French invasion of his own dominions, turned up to meet the English king. He was full of advice for Edward, but came without the expected army. Another would-be ally, Louis, Count of St Pol, Jacquetta Woodville’s brother, failed to keep his promise to deliver St Quentin to the English. Disgusted, Edward entered into negotiations with King Louis XI of France. On 29 August 1475, in what was known as the Treaty of Picquigny, the two nations made their peace. Among the treaty’s provisions was that Edward’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, or, in case of her death, her sister Mary, was to marry the Dauphin Charles of France. Louis was to pay 75,000 crowns to Edward, followed by a pension of 50,000 crowns per annum. William, Lord Hastings and other royal confidants were to receive pensions as well. Commyns claimed that the Marquis of Dorset was among the pensioners, but historians have not found corroboration of this in the records. Though the peace was unpopular with some hawkish Englishmen, notably Richard, Duke of Gloucester, it benefitted English trade and relieved Edward’s subjects of parliamentary taxation.
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Anthony is not named among those receiving pensions, and what he thought of the treaty is unrecorded. His trip to France, however, seems to have reawakened his taste for foreign travel, for on 1 October 1475, Edward IV wrote a letter to Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, informing him that Rivers, ‘one of his chief confidants and the brother of his dear consort’, would be travelling to Rome and would like to visit Milan and other places belonging to the duke, as well as the duke himself if it were convenient.
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Sadly, we do not have a detailed description of Anthony’s travels, or an account of whom he visited, but several years later, William Caxton, whose printing press Rivers patronised, recalled in his epilogue to
The Cordyale
(translated by Rivers) that Anthony had been on pilgrimage to Rome, to shrines in Naples, and to St Nicholas at Bari.
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In April 1476, Anthony obtained a papal indulgence for the Chapel of Our Lady of Pewe at Westminster, where Anthony hoped to be buried.
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All did not go smoothly for the English traveller, however. On 7 March 1476, Francesco Pietrasancta, Milanese Ambassador to the Court of Savoy, reported to the Duke of Milan that all of Rivers’s money and valuables had been stolen at the Torre di Baccano and that Queen Elizabeth was sending a royal servant to Rome with letters of exchange for 4,000 ducats.
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Anthony’s misadventures had also come to the attention of John Paston III, who wrote on 21 March 1476, that Lord Rivers ‘was at Rome right well and honorably’ and had travelled 12 miles outside the city when he was robbed of all of his jewels and plate, which were worth at least 1,000 marks.
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The saga of Anthony’s jewels did not end there, however. On 10 May 1476, the Venetian Senate issued this sinister-sounding decree:

    That for the purpose of ascertaining the truth as to this theft, in the neighbourhood of Borne, of the precious jewels and plate belonging to Lord Anthony Angre Lord Scales, brother of the Queen of England, and for the discovery of the perpetrators and of the distribution made of the property, – Be the arrest of Nicholas Cerdo and Vitus Cerdo, Germans, Nicholas Cerdo, and Anthony, a German of Schleswick, dealer in ultramarine, (arrested by permission from the Signory,) ratified at the suit of the State attorneys; and as they would not tell the whole truth by fair means, be a committee formed, the majority of which to have liberty to examine and rack them all or each; and the committee shall, with the deposition thus obtained, come to this Council and do justice.
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Three days later, the Senate issued another decree, showing that when travelling abroad, it was extremely helpful to have royal connections:

    Lord Scales, the brother-in-law of the King of England, has come to Venice on account of certain jewels of which he was robbed at Torre di Baccano, near Borne. Part of them having been brought hither and sold to certain citizens, he has earnestly requested the Signory to have said jewels restored to him, alleging in his favour civil statutes, enacting that stolen goods should be freely restored to their owner. As it is for the interest of the Signory to make every demonstration of love and good will towards his lordship on his own account, and especially out of regard for the King, his brother-in-law, – Put to the ballot, that the said jewels purchased in this city by Venetian subjects be restored gratuitously to the said lord; he being told that this is done out of deference for the King of England and for his lordship, without his incurring any cost.

        As the affair is committed to the State attorneys. – Be it carried that they be bound, together with the ordinary councils, to dispatch it within two months, and ascertain whether or not the purchasers of the jewels purchased them honestly. Should they have been bought unfairly, the purchasers to lose their money. While, if the contrary were the case, Toma Mocenigo, Nicolo de Ca de Besaro, and Marin Contarini shall be bound as they themselves volunteered to pay what was expended for the jewels, together with the costs, namely, 400 ducats. These moneys to be drawn for through a bill of exchange by these three noblemen on the consul in London, there to be paid by the consul and passed by him to the debit of the factory on account of goods loaded by Venetians in England on board the Flanders galleys (Ser Antonio Contarini, captain,) on their return to this city; and in like manner to the debit of the London factory here, on account of goods loaded on board the present Flanders galleys (Ser Andrea de Mosto, captain), bound to England, on their arrival in those parts. If the attorneys and the appointed councils fail to dispatch the matter as above, they shall be fined two ducats each; yet, on the expiration of the said term, the said three noblemen shall be bound to pay the moneys above mentioned.
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Having recovered part of his jewels, Anthony resumed his travels. (As his stay had been an expensive one, it may be that the Venetians were not entirely sorry to see him on his way.) In June, he arrived at the camp of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, who was preparing to fight the Swiss. Giovanni Pietro Panigarola, the Milanese ambassador, reported on 9 June that Anthony planned to stay two or three days before returning to England. On 11 June however, he wrote:

    M. de Scales, brother of the Queen of England, has been to see the duke and offered to take his place in the line of battle. But hearing the day before yesterday that the enemy were near at hand and they expected to meet them he asked leave to depart, saying he was sorry he could not stay, and so he took leave and went. This is esteemed great cowardice in him, and lack of spirit and honour. The duke laughed about it to me, saying, he has gone because he is afraid.
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This was the only time Anthony shirked battle. Perhaps, recalling the Duke of Burgundy’s betrayal of the English of the year before, he had decided he owed the duke no favours; perhaps he had simply realised that this was not his fight. Whatever Anthony’s motives, his decision was a fortunate one, for at the Battle of Morat that ensued on 22 June, the duke lost thousands of men, and would lose his own life at the Battle of Nancy six months later. Anthony’s decision to avoid this one battle meant that he would return to England with his life, if not all of his goods, intact.