Edward IV

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward IV of England stood 6 ft 4 in tall, a towering figure in an age when few men came close to that height. He wore the crown twice, and the second time he had to fight his way back to it from exile.

  He inherited his family's claim at the age of eighteen, in the middle of a civil war. He then lost his throne to the very ally who had helped him win it. Yet he returned and ruled again until his death.

  How did a teenager come to carry a whole dynasty's claim? Why did the Earl of Warwick, known as the Kingmaker, turn on the king he had helped to raise? And what became of the sons Edward left behind in 1483?

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• 2. A Claim Inherited

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  On the 28th of April 1442, a son was born at Rouen in Normandy to Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and his wife Cecily Neville. The boy was their eldest surviving son, and until his father died he was known as the Earl of March. Both parents descended directly from King Edward III, which gave the child a possible claim to the crown. That claim grew stronger in 1447, when the childless King Henry VI lost his heir, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and York became next in line.

  Rumours that Edward was illegitimate circulated, but contemporaries dismissed them as political mischief, and later historians agree. The family's looks tell part of the story. Edward, his brother George, Duke of Clarence, and his sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, were all tall and blond. Their father was short and dark. The youngest brother, the future Richard III, took after the duke instead.

  England was in poor shape during Edward's boyhood. The economy had declined, armies kept losing abroad, and the government at the centre was weak and corrupt. The Duke of York governed English lands in France until 1445, when Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, replaced him. Edward and his younger brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were probably raised at Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches, where their father was the dominant landowner.

  In 1447 York was named chief governor of Ireland, though he did not take up the post until 1449. Meanwhile the French recaptured most of Normandy, leaving Calais as England's last foothold in the north of France. Somerset, blamed by many for the losses, became the king's chief minister. Politics hardened into a feud between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, who included Somerset, William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou.

  In August 1453, Henry VI collapsed into a catatonic stupor when news arrived that Gascony, an English possession for more than 300 years, was lost. The Duke of York took over the government, backed by Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, and Salisbury's eldest son, Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. In January 1454, twelve-year-old Edward travelled with his father to London for the Great Council. The birth of Henry's son Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, in October 1453 had given the Lancastrians a living figurehead.

  By 17, the Earl of March was a political and military leader in his own right. After defeat at the Battle of Ludford Bridge in 1459, his father and Edmund fled to Ireland, while Edward, Salisbury and Warwick escaped to Calais. Manifestoes circulated widely with Edward's name beside theirs, insisting that their quarrel was only with Henry's evil counsellors.

  In 1460, Edward crossed the Channel with Warwick and Salisbury and marched into London. At Northampton in July he commanded one of three Yorkist divisions in a victory that captured Henry VI. York came back from Ireland and walked into the Palace of Westminster declaring himself king. The assembled lords answered with silence. The Act of Accord settled on a compromise. Henry would keep the crown, but York and his descendants would inherit it.

  That deal set aside the legally accepted heir, and it stirred up serious opposition. In late 1460, Edward received his first independent command, against a Lancastrian uprising in Wales. His father, Salisbury and Edmund marched north to crush another in Yorkshire, and all three were killed in the defeat at Wakefield on the 30th of December. Edward now led the Yorkist party. Warwick, who had remained in London, now stood beside a leader still in his teens.

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• 3. Snow and Sun

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  Philippe de Commines, who knew the courts of Europe, remembered the young Edward as handsome, friendly and full of energy. He was an impressive sight in armour and took care to dress in splendid clothes. The display was deliberate, because it set him against Henry VI, whose frailty of body and mind weakened his authority.

  On the 2nd of February 1461, Edward won a hard fight at Mortimer's Cross in Herefordshire. Before the battle, a weather effect called a parhelion, or three suns, appeared in the sky. Edward took it as his emblem, the "Sun in splendour". On the 17th of February, Warwick lost the Second Battle of St Albans, and the Lancastrians took Henry VI back into their custody.

  Edward and Warwick met in London, where Edward was hurriedly proclaimed king, with his reign dated from the 4th of March 1461. They then marched north. On the 29th of March, in the middle of a snowstorm, the armies met at Towton. It was the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, and the Yorkists won decisively.

  Nobody knows exactly how many died. Estimates run from 9,000 to 20,000, and the uncertainty is real, because most of the mass graves were emptied or moved over the centuries. Bodies were also usually stripped of clothes and armour before burial. What is clear is that the Lancastrian nobility suffered enormous losses, which helps explain the bitterness among the survivors. Since 1996, excavations have uncovered more than 50 skeletons. Their injuries show how brutal the fighting was, including extensive mutilation after death.

  Margaret of Anjou escaped to Scotland with her son, Edward of Westminster. The new king returned to London and was crowned on the 28th of June 1461. Henry VI stayed at large for more than a year before he was caught and locked in the Tower of London. Killing him would have achieved little while his son lived, because it would have moved the Lancastrian claim from a frail prisoner to a young man at liberty.

  As long as Margaret and her son stayed beyond Edward's reach, the crown he had won in the snow would never be fully secure.

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• 4. The Secret Marriage

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  John Neville's victory at the Battle of Hexham in 1464 seemed to end the Lancastrian threat. Until then, Edward had leaned heavily on the Nevilles, because most nobles had stayed loyal to Henry or sat on the fence. With the military danger fading, a quarrel over foreign policy came into the open. It turned on England, France and the Duchy of Burgundy, in which two powers tried to ally against the third. Edward favoured Burgundy. Even so, he let Warwick negotiate a treaty with Louis XI of France. It floated a bride for Edward: Anne of France, the king's daughter, or Bona of Savoy, his sister-in-law.

  In October 1464, Warwick discovered that Edward had secretly married Elizabeth Woodville on the 1st of May. She was a widow with two sons, and her first husband, John Grey of Groby, had died fighting for Lancaster at the Second Battle of St Albans. Warwick was furious. The secret wedding showed plainly that he did not control the king, whatever people had suggested. Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, came from the upper nobility, but her father, Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, was only a middle-ranking baron. The Privy Council told Edward, with unusual bluntness, that "she was no wife for a prince such as himself, for she was not the daughter of a duke or earl."

  The match was unwise and unusual, though not unheard of. Henry VI's own mother, Catherine of Valois, had married her chamberlain, Owen Tudor. By all accounts Elizabeth had real charm and intelligence, and Edward was used to getting what he wanted. Historians generally agree he acted on impulse, but they disagree about whether it was also a calculated move. One view holds that the Woodvilles' modest rank was the appeal, since, unlike the Nevilles, they would depend on him for everything. Critics reply that he had far better options. Everyone agrees the marriage shaped the rest of his reign.

  Twelve of the new queen's siblings survived to adulthood, and they became rivals for offices, estates and good marriages. Resentment grew as her sisters made a string of advantageous matches. Catherine Woodville wed Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Anne Woodville married William, heir to Henry Bourchier, 1st Earl of Essex. Eleanor Woodville was matched with Anthony, heir to Edmund Grey, 1st Earl of Kent. Each wedding added to the resentment that Warwick would soon turn into a weapon.

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• 5. Warwick's Revolt

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  In 1467, Edward dismissed his Lord Chancellor, George Neville, Archbishop of York, who was Warwick's brother. Warwick answered by courting Edward's discontented younger brother and heir, the Duke of Clarence, whose estates lay beside the Neville lands in the north. Edward then blocked a marriage between Clarence and Warwick's eldest daughter Isabel. Clarence ignored him. In early July he crossed to Calais, where George Neville conducted the wedding under Warwick's eye.

  The three men issued a remonstrance listing the alleged abuses of the Woodvilles and other advisers close to Edward. They then returned to London and raised an army to remove these evil councillors and set up good government.

  On the 24th of July 1469, with Edward still in the north, a Neville force beat the royal army at Edgecote Moor. Edward was then held at Middleham Castle. On the 12th of August his father-in-law, Richard Woodville, and Richard's younger son John were executed at Kenilworth. Support for Warwick and Clarence proved thin, and Edward was freed in September and took up the throne again.

  Calm on the surface hid real tension. The Percys, the Nevilles' old rivals in the north, had fought for Lancaster at Towton, so their titles and lands had been confiscated and handed to Warwick's brother John Neville. In early 1470 Edward restored Henry Percy as Earl of Northumberland. John was compensated with the title Marquess of Montagu, but it was a serious demotion for a key supporter.

  Warwick and Clarence used a private feud to launch the Lincolnshire Rebellion in March 1470. It failed, and in May the two men fled to France. Louis XI saw his chance and persuaded Warwick to negotiate with his old enemy, Margaret of Anjou. She agreed in the end, but first she made him kneel before her in silence for fifteen minutes.

  With French backing, Warwick landed in England on the 9th of September 1470 and declared that he meant to restore Henry. The Yorkist regime was by then deeply unpopular, and the Lancastrians quickly raised an army of more than 30,000. When John Neville changed sides, Edward barely escaped capture. His flight ended at Bruges.

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• 6. Exile and Return

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  Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was married to Edward's sister Margaret, and he gave Edward little more than shelter in Flanders. Edward never forgot how little help he received. With him were a few hundred men, among them his younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Anthony Woodville and William Hastings.

  At home, the revived Lancastrian regime repeated the troubles of Henry's first reign. His frailty of mind and body left him unable to rule, and a fight for control followed. It was made worse because the coalition behind him was made up of bitter enemies. Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, blamed Warwick for his father's death in 1455 and his elder brother's in 1464. Warwick and Clarence soon found themselves isolated.

  In March 1471, backed by wealthy Flemish merchants, Edward landed near Hull, close to his Yorkshire estates. Few rushed to join him. The city of York opened its gates only after he said he sought just his dukedom, as Henry IV had done seventy years before. The first sizeable group to join was 600 men under William Parr and James Harrington. Parr had fought against the Yorkists at Edgecote in 1469, and his defection confirmed Clarence's decision to switch sides. As Edward marched south, recruits kept arriving, including 3,000 at Leicester.

  Edward entered London without opposition and took Henry prisoner. On the 14th of April, Warwick was defeated and killed at the Battle of Barnet. A second Lancastrian army was destroyed at Tewkesbury on the 4th of May, where the sixteen-year-old Edward of Westminster, heir to Henry's throne, died on the field. Leaders who survived, Somerset among them, were executed soon afterwards. Henry VI died a few days later. A contemporary chronicle blamed "melancholy", but it is generally assumed he was killed on Edward's orders.

  The Lancastrian cause looked finished, yet a quarrel between Clarence and Gloucester unsettled the regime. They had married Isabel Neville and Anne Neville, daughters of the Earl and Countess of Warwick and heirs to their mother's rich inheritance. Estates that Edward had granted could be taken back, which kept the brothers dependent on his favour. Property gained through marriage carried no such leash, which is why the dispute mattered.

  Clarence was widely suspected of involvement in the last significant rebellion, which ended in February 1474 when John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, surrendered. Oxford lived to command the Lancastrian army at Bosworth in 1485. Suspicion of Clarence was one factor in his execution in the Tower on the 18th of February 1478. The tale that he was "drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine" appears to have been a joke by Edward about a favourite drink.

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• 7. Splendour and Debt

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  In 1475, Edward allied with Burgundy and declared war on France, and for a moment the Hundred Years' War threatened to flare up again. Duke Charles was tied down at the Siege of Neuss, so Louis XI opened talks. Soon after Edward landed at Calais, the two kings signed the Treaty of Picquigny. It formally ended the Hundred Years' War, which had been in abeyance since 1453. Edward received 75,000 crowns at once and a pension of 50,000 crowns a year, enough to repay the cost of his army.

  After 1471, Edward ruled in relative peace, even with Henry Tudor, the last remaining Lancastrian claimant, abroad. Commentators nonetheless see a marked change between his two reigns. The failure of attempts to reconcile old enemies such as Somerset left him more ruthless. The commander who had led from the front in his youth showed less of that energy as he aged.

  In 1482, Edward backed Alexander Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany and brother of James III of Scotland, in a bid for the Scottish throne. Gloucester invaded and took the town of Edinburgh, but not Edinburgh Castle, where James was being held prisoner by his own nobles. Albany switched sides, and with no siege equipment the English had to withdraw. The costly campaign yielded little beyond the capture of Berwick Castle.

  Parliament grew unwilling to grant taxes for wars that Edward then failed to fight, and he spent the money on his household instead. Still, the Crown gained too. Ownership of the Duchy of Lancaster passed to the Crown, where it remains today. In 1478, his staff compiled the Black Book, a thorough review of royal finances that was still in use a century later. He also invested heavily in business ventures with the City of London.

  The economy recovered from the slump of 1450 to 1470, yet Edward's spending routinely outran his income. When he died in 1483, the Crown held less than £1,200 in cash. His close ties with the London branch of the Medici Bank ended with its bankruptcy, and in 1517 the Medici were still pressing for repayment of his debts.

  Money and diplomacy were linked. Flemish merchants bought more English wool than anyone else, which made Edward lean toward Burgundy, although Charles's reluctance to help in 1471 cooled the friendship. Charles died in 1477, and the 1482 Treaty of Arras followed. Flanders and the Burgundian Netherlands became part of the Holy Roman Empire, France took the rest, and England lost much of its influence.

  A visitor from Europe called Edward's court "the most splendid... in all Christendom". The king spent lavishly on clothes, jewels and furnishings, and he collected illuminated manuscripts, many made for him by craftsmen in Bruges. His books favoured the lives of great rulers, including Julius Caesar, along with chronicles and instructional and religious works. In 1476, William Caxton set up the first English printing press in the outbuildings of Westminster Abbey. On the 18th of November 1477 he printed Sayengis of the Philosophres, which Anthony Woodville had translated into English for Edward.

  Nobody knows where the library was kept, but Edward moved volumes from the Great Wardrobe to Eltham Palace and employed a yeoman "to kepe the king's bookes". More than forty of his books survive from the 15th century and now sit in the Royal Collection of manuscripts at the British Library. He also began great improvements to St George's Chapel at Windsor, which Henry VII later completed and the First English Civil War badly damaged. At Eltham he paid for the Great Hall that still stands, and in December 1482 it hosted a feast for 2,000 people. Edward would be dead within months.

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• 8. After the King

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  At Easter 1483, Edward fell fatally ill. His health had been failing for some time, and his physicians blamed his many ailments partly on a habit of using emetics, which let him eat to excess, empty his stomach and eat again. He lived long enough to add codicils to his will, the most important naming his brother Gloucester as Protector after his death. He died on the 9th of April 1483 and was buried in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.

  The cause of death remains uncertain. Rumours of poison were common in an age when sudden deaths often had no obvious explanation. Pneumonia and malaria have been suggested, though both were familiar and easy to describe at the time, which weighs against them. One contemporary blamed apoplexy brought on by excess, which fits what is known of his habits. Another theory points to syphilis.

  Edward and Elizabeth Woodville had ten children, and seven survived him. The eldest son, also named Edward, had been made Prince of Wales at seven months old and given his own household at three. He lived at Ludlow Castle under the eye of his uncle Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers. Now twelve, he became Edward V but was never crowned, and in July 1483 Gloucester became King Richard III. The historical consensus is that the boy and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, were killed, probably between July and September 1483. Who gave the order, and why, is still argued. The uncle who took the throne was the one who gained.

  Richard declared his nephews illegitimate on the grounds that Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid. The Titulus Regius of 1484 rested on an alleged earlier pre-contract of marriage between Edward and Lady Eleanor Talbot. Both were dead by then, but Philippe de Commines said that Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, claimed to have performed the ceremony himself.

  By mid-August 1483, Elizabeth Woodville was certain her sons were dead. Her grief turned to fury, and she opened secret talks with Margaret Beaufort, promising support if Henry Tudor would marry her eldest daughter, Elizabeth. In December 1483, Henry swore an oath to do so, and he kept it after his coronation in October 1485. Once secure, Henry VII annulled the Titulus Regius and arrested Stillington, who died in prison in 1491. Even so, the Yorkist cause lived on well into the 16th century, through pretenders such as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

  The Wars of the Roses have been documented by many historians, but Edward as a person is less well known. Nineteenth-century writers such as William Stubbs generally dismissed him as a bloodthirsty nonentity. In 1974, Charles Ross wrote the most comprehensive modern biography. He concluded that the peace and stability of the later reign were squandered on short-term aggrandisement. Ross judged Edward the only king since 1066, while actually holding his throne, who "failed to secure the safe succession of his son". He put the blame on Edward's lack of political foresight.

  Edward's private life left its own marks on history. His mistresses included Lady Eleanor Talbot and Elizabeth Lucy, and the most famous was Jane Shore. Richard III later forced her to perform public penance at Paul's Cross. Thomas More claimed it backfired, since "her great shame wan her much praise." Among Edward's acknowledged illegitimate children, Arthur Plantagenet, 1st Viscount Lisle, wrote the Lisle Papers, an important source for the Tudor period. His legitimate daughter Elizabeth of York, who married Henry VII, was the mother of Henry VIII.

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