The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (18 page)

In itself, Anthony’s interest in this new technology is telling, for Caxton’s press attracted only a few noble patrons in England: from 1476 to 1491, only two other peers, John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and William Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, patronised Caxton by asking him to translate and print works (and neither patronised Caxton until after Anthony’s death in 1483). In doing his own translations, moreover, Anthony was unique among the three.
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In patronising Caxton, therefore, he was not following fashion.

Anthony followed his first printed edition of the
Dicts
with a presentation copy, in manuscript form, intended for the king and completed on 24 December 1477. In a leaf inserted at the beginning of the manuscript, Anthony kneels besides a tonsured figure, probably Guillaume de Tignonville, the original author, or the scribe who prepared the manuscript. Edward IV, flanked by his queen and Prince Edward, is shown in the act of accepting the book. Among the onlookers, one figure is uncrowned but clad in ermine like the king, queen, and prince: probably this represents Richard, Duke of Gloucester. (The Duke of Clarence, as we shall see, would not have been pictured at court at this time.)
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If the 1470s was a watershed for printing in England, the social highlight of the decade was the wedding, on 15 January 1478, between the king’s second son, Richard, Duke of York, and Anne Mowbray, the heiress to John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. The groom was 4 years old; the bride – a great-granddaughter of John Woodville’s elderly bride – a year older.
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Earl Rivers and John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, led the little girl into the chapel at Westminster, Rivers on the left hand, Lincoln on the right hand. Under a canopy waited the king, the queen, Prince Edward, the Ladies Elizabeth, Mary, and Cecily, and the king’s mother, Cecily, Duchess of York. Following the wedding ceremony, Richard, Duke of Gloucester and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham led the bride to dinner, where the Duchess of Buckingham – Elizabeth Woodville’s youngest sister, Katherine – sat with the groom’s mother. The Marquis of Dorset sat at a side table.

The wedding festivities concluded on 22 January with the royal jousts. The first to enter was the Marquis of Dorset, his helm carried by the Duke of Buckingham. Following Dorset were five coursers, their rich trappers ‘enramplished with A’s of gold curiously embroidered’ and a void courser for the accomplishment of his arms. His younger brother, Richard, clothed in blue and tawny, followed with three coursers, with trappers of crimson cloth of gold and tissue. Edward Woodville was accompanied by servants clad in blue and tawny velvet, embroidered with gold ‘E’s’. The showstopper, however, was Earl Rivers, who made his entrance arrayed in the habit of a white hermit, inside a black-velvet-walled hermitage. Dorset and Richard Grey competed in Jousts Royal, Edward Woodville in ‘Ostinge Harnesse’ (hosting harness, or field armour), and Earl Rivers in Tourneying.

Dorset, Richard Grey, and Edward Woodville each managed to break their opponent’s spears, though the day was marred for Edward by the injury of one of his horses. As for Earl Rivers, he and Thomas Hansard ‘charged together so furiously to the Tourney, that all the field gave laud to both parties’, but Thomas ‘rudely let fly a spring between the shoulder and the helm’ of Rivers after ‘Ho!’ had been cried. ‘This the Earl furiously returned upon him, and so accomplished six strokes between them’. None of the Woodville men, however, carried away the prizes, in the form of golden letters set with precious gems, that were distributed by Elizabeth, the king’s oldest daughter. Nonetheless, Earl Rivers rewarded the kings of arms and heralds with 20 marks.

Dazzling as the wedding festivities were, however, there must have been a sense on the part of the wedding guests that some grim business lay around the corner, because there was one member of the family who was conspicuously absent from the celebrations: George, Duke of Clarence. He was a prisoner in the Tower.

George, Duke of Clarence, had allied with the Earl of Warwick against Edward IV, the duke’s brother, in 1469. Before the Battle of Barnet, Edward IV had won his brother back to his side, but their relationship had been an uneasy one since then.

Clarence had married Warwick’s daughter, Isabel, whose sister, Anne, married Henry VI’s son, Edward of Lancaster. The death of Warwick at Barnet, and the death of Edward at Tewkesbury, plunged Clarence and his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, into a nasty dispute regarding the lands of Warwick and those of his widowed countess, who had fled into sanctuary at Beaulieu.
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As Isabel’s husband, Clarence naturally wanted the lands for himself, while the unmarried Gloucester just as naturally wanted to take the widowed Anne for his bride and thereby lay claim to her share of his inheritance. The feelings of Anne, who was just a few weeks away from her 15th birthday when she was widowed, are not recorded, but after the debacle at Tewkesbury, marriage to the king’s loyal brother, Gloucester, offered her security, wealth, and a powerful protector, advantages of which she could have hardly been unconscious. No one seemed at all interested in protecting the rights of the Countess of Warwick, an heiress in her own right, to her own inheritance and to her dower and jointure lands.

While the countess remained immured at Beaulieu, frantically writing petitions to the queen and other great ladies in hopes of gaining their sympathy,
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Clarence went so far as to hide Anne from Gloucester in order to avoid sharing the Warwick inheritance. He was no match for Gloucester, however; the Crowland Chronicler, tells us, so bizarrely the story could well be true, that he discovered the earl’s daughter ‘dressed as a kitchen-maid in London’, whereupon he took her to sanctuary at St Martin’s, no doubt having provided her with a change of clothing first.
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No later than 6 June 1474, when records first refer to them as a married couple, and probably soon after the pair received a papal dispensation on 22 April 1472, Gloucester and Anne had married.
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The dispute about the sisters’ inheritance dragged on, however, and was finally settled by Parliament in successive acts in 1474 and 1475, in a division that satisfied neither brother entirely. The Countess of Warwick, stripped of her rights by a provision that declared her to be as if one naturally dead, left sanctuary and went to live with Gloucester. With his share of the Warwick inheritance, Gloucester set off to establish himself in the north, where much of his share of the spoils were concentrated.

The Woodvilles took little part in this quarrel, which did not concern them. On 17 February 1472, John Paston II wrote that the king, the queen, Clarence, and Gloucester had gone to the manor of Sheen, ‘not all in charity’, and that when the king spoke to Clarence in favour of Gloucester’s marriage to Anne, Clarence replied that ‘he may well have my lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood’ – in other words, Clarence was quite happy to concede Anne’s person, but not her property.
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What role, if any, the queen took during this conference is not stated, but Michael Hicks has pointed out that a few days later, she renewed a grant to Gloucester of a stewardship carrying a fee of £100. This may mean that she sided with Gloucester in his quarrel with Clarence, as Hicks suggests;
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alternatively, Elizabeth may have simply been following her husband’s wishes or continuing the status quo. Hicks also posits that the Woodvilles supported Gloucester’s bid to remove the Countess of Warwick from sanctuary in June 1473, a move that John Paston II noted met with Clarence’s disapproval. The evidence that the Woodvilles got involved in this fraternal dispute at this point rests mainly on their physical proximity to the king at the time, however, and seems rather tenuous.
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With the matter of his estates wrapped up, Clarence dutifully joined the expedition to France in 1475, but otherwise was at the margins of political life, especially compared to his younger brother Gloucester, who was becoming a powerful and popular figure in the north. Yet that was soon to be the least of his problems, for on 22 December 1476, Clarence’s wife, Isabel, died. Her infant son, Richard, followed her to the grave on 1 January 1477. Four days later, yet another death occurred, but this one had political, not personal consequences: Charles, Duke of Burgundy, was killed in battle at Nancy, leaving his unmarried daughter, Mary, as his heir.
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With the death of her father, the question of a marital alliance for Mary suddenly became a question of the greatest importance. For the widowed Duchess of Burgundy, there was an obvious solution: to wed Mary to her favourite brother George, Duke of Clarence. Unfortunately, this solution did not appeal to Edward, who had not forgotten his brother’s rebellion a few years earlier. Twenty-year-old Mary herself preferred Maximilian of Austria, while Louis XI of France offered her the 6-year-old Dauphin of France. The prospect of the latter match was equally distasteful to Edward, who sent an embassy to his sister’s court. The ambassadors, Dr John Coke and Louis de Bretaylle, Anthony Woodville’s friend, put forth Edward’s own offer of a husband: Anthony Woodville. That it was a serious offer is indicated by the fact that Edward offered military support if Mary agreed to make a Woodville marriage. Anthony had indeed come a long way since Edward had ‘rated’ him at Calais years before! Mary, however, was unlikely to have been enthusiastic about such a match, for, as Philippe de Commynes pointed out, ‘he was only an earl, and she the greatest heiress of her time’. In any case, she had already decided upon Maxmilian by the time the English proposal arrived.
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None of this could have been gratifying to Clarence, especially when, during the same year, Edward refused yet another potential match for his brother: this time between Clarence and a sister of James III of Scotland. He explained piously that Clarence and the Duchess of Burgundy, who had been offered the hand of James’s brother, the Duke of Albany, could not consider any offers during their year of mourning for their spouses.
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Edward’s reservations about allowing Clarence to marry outside England would prove to be well justified, for Clarence began to act erratically – and murderously. On 12 April 1477, his men seized Ankarette Tywnho, who had served the Duchess of Clarence, on the grounds that she had given her mistress poisoned ale at Warwick on 10 October 1476 – more than two months before the duchess actually died. John Thursby, in turn, was accused of poisoning Clarence’s young son, Richard, with ale administered on 21 December 1476, while Sir Roger Tocotes was accused of aiding, abetting, and harbouring the other two defendants. Ankarette Twynho and John Thursby were hauled to Warwick Castle, where a jury, thoroughly intimidated by the Duke of Clarence, found them guilty. They were executed that same day. Roger Tocotes was indicted but evaded capture; later, when it was safe for him to do so, he surrendered himself and was later acquitted. The charges seem unlikely at best: the
Tewkesbury Chronicle
, which attributed Isabel’s death at age 25 to complications from her recent childbirth, places Isabel at Tewkesbury at the time she was supposedly being poisoned at Warwick, and there seems little point in murdering Clarence’s younger son while leaving his older son, Edward, unharmed.
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Meanwhile, an astronomer at Oxford named John Stacy, accused of using sorcery to procure the death of a cuckolded husband, implicated Thomas Burdett, who was a member of Clarence’s household. As the details emerged, the allegations became even more serious: the men, along with a Thomas Blake, were accused of using astronomy to predict the deaths of the king and his eldest son – the most frightening charge that could be levelled against an astronomer of the day. The men were tried on 19 May 1477. Blake was pardoned due to the intervention of the Bishop of Norwich, but Burdett and Stacy were hanged the next day at Tyburn.

A day or so after the hangings, the Duke of Clarence, with Dr William Goddard, a Franciscan friar, in tow, barged into a council meeting at Westminster. There, Goddard read Burdett’s and Stacy’s declarations to the council, after which he and Clarence abruptly departed. The king, who was at Windsor, missed this show, but when he returned to Westminster, he summoned Clarence, who appeared before him around 10 June 1477, when Edward charged him with having violated the laws of England and threatening the security of judges and jurors – the latter, as Charles Ross points out, probably a reference to the Ankarette Twynho incident. Clarence was sent to the Tower, where he would remain a prisoner for months.
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