Edward IV’s overthrow and restoration were seen by contemporaries as dramatic evidence of the arbitrary revolution of Fortune’s wheel. For later writers this instability was, rather, a sign that royal authority had been profoundly compromised and had not yet been effectively reasserted. But what happened in 1469—71 hardly sustains this interpretation. Although Warwick and Clarence ran through the whole gamut of opposition much more quickly than Richard, duke of York, had done, they had even less success than York in persuading men to oppose the king. Warwick found it difficult to mobilise his retainers in 1469 and 1470, and those of his followers who combined service to him with service to the crown (a ‘double allegiance’ which is sometimes assumed to be detrimental to royal authority) tended on the whole to stay loyal to the king. The lesson of 1469—71 (and of the Wars of the Roses in general) is the importance attached to effective royal authority. The violent resort to self-help which accompanied dislocation at the centre generally rallied support for the king — as Edward IV found in 1469.
What the period does show, however, is the specific danger posed by a rival royal claimant, whose mere existence could make opposition respectable. Clarence’s claim to the throne was treasonable; Warwick’s support for Henry VI, by definition, was not. With both Lancastrian claimants out of the way, the 1470s do have a very different ‘feel’ about them compared with the 1460s. To put it rather crudely, Edward now had room to make mistakes, and his domestic policies show him to have become unassailable. Contemporaries recognised as much, and the early 1470s brought the reconciliation of most of those Lancastrians, like Sir Richard Tunstall, who had remained in opposition throughout the 1460s. The handful of exceptions included the Lancastrian half blood — now represented by Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry — and a few men who knew that they had no hope of regaining their land under York, such as John de Vere, earl of Oxford, whose estates had been used to endow Edward’s younger brother Richard, duke of Gloucester. Oxford secured French backing for a rebellion in 1473, but, like the other flurries of unrest around this time, it came to nothing.
The clearest evidence of Edward’s authority is his successful manipulation of property descents: most famously in his virtual disinheriting of the Mowbray heirs to endow his second son. The integrity of inheritance was a subject about which landowners, understandably, were normally extremely sensitive — his disinheritance of Bolingbroke in 1399 had cost Richard II his throne — and it is testimony to Edward’s authority that such interventions met no significant opposition. Many of the tenurial readjustments were enshrined in parliamentary acts: one sign of the extreme docility of Yorkist parliaments.
Such readjustments were not only directed at endowing the royal family. Edward used the same tactics to redesign the political map of England by edging out men who had no place in his plans. William Herbert II, whose father had been Edward’s right-hand man in Wales in the 1460s, was made to exchange his earldom of Pembroke for land in the south-west. His father’s role was taken instead by a group of lesser royal servants associated with the council established for the prince of Wales at Ludlow.
Herbert was a nonentity. But Edward was also able to destroy his own brother, Clarence. By the time of the duke’s execution for treason in 1478, his power had been deliberately eroded — in part by demonstrating that he no longer enjoyed royal support; in part by taking back some of his land. Edward achieved the latter through a parliamentary act of resumption, and it is characteristic of him that a measure which under Henry VI had been seen as an unacceptable restriction on the royal prerogative should become, in his hands, a valuable weapon in the royal armoury. Edward used regular acts of resumption not only to rethink his patronage (as in Clarence’s case), but to make patronage go further at no cost to himself, since each grant of exemption from such an act was a further exercise of patronage.
Edward’s manipulation of landed influence was designed to create power as well as destroy it. Throughout his reign he encouraged the formation of regional power bases for his most trusted supporters, including his brother, Gloucester (who was effectively put in charge of the north of England in the 1470s), and his chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings (who took over Clarence’s influence in the north midlands). For many subsequent commentators this policy was a disaster: the wanton diminution of royal authority by a king who should have known better. But this assumes that the power which Edward delegated was thereby lost to him, which was not the case. As the career of Clarence shows, what Edward made, he could break. Even without such dramatic royal intervention, a former royal ally who tried to turn his power against the king was likely to find (as Warwick did) that he could not carry all his men with him.
The role of the noblemen who exercised influence on the king’s behalf over whole regions differed only in degree from that of the smaller landowners who acted for the king at a local level. Under both Yorkist kings, the relationship of such men to the crown was generally formalised by their membership of the royal household — a body which formed the essential bridge between central authority and local government. When the king’s commands were carried out by men who were simultaneously his servants and landowners in the area concerned, royal government could be presented as an act of co-operation rather than aggression.
That co-operation should not be taken as a sign of royal weakness. For Edward IV, delegation was not a diminution, still less a negation, of his authority. On the contrary, allowing influence to his servants affirmed his role as the source of power. This explains both his readiness to sanction the development of power bases by his allies and his cynical disregard for the existing interests of others. Both traits were in evidence throughout his reign. Edward’s expulsion in 1470 did not force a change of style; nor were his opponents seeking such a thing. Their grievances were personal rather than structural.
The same could be said of Edward IV’s own attitude to kingship. In sharp contrast to Henry VII, Edward took no interest in setting up institutional power structures. His most impressive achievements remained dependent on him. His re-ordering of the political map rested on a series of personal relationships. The council of the prince of Wales was the most ‘institutional’ of his local arrangements, but it would inevitably dissolve on the king’s death, when his heir ceased to be prince of Wales.
The same criticism can be levelled against Edward’s development of the chamber as a financial agency under his direct control. Under this system, the receivers of the crown lands (most of whom were household servants) paid their revenues directly into the chamber, where they were available for the king’s immediate use. This gave far more flexibility than exchequer practice, which was based on the assignment of future revenue. It was also highly efficient. Coupled with a concerted effort to maximise the yield from prerogative sources such as wardships and vacant temporalities — which were also paid directly into the chamber — it enabled Edward to build up the cash reserves which, at the end of his reign, paid for a year’s campaigning in Scotland before he had to ask parliament for money. But when Edward’s directing authority was removed, the chamber organisation collapsed, and the exchequer had to pick up the pieces.
Edward IV evidently found the direct exercise of power very congenial. His recorded pronouncements catch the voice of a king absolutely confident of his authority in his dealings with his subjects. Significantly, one of the things which most impressed contemporaries was his marvellous memory for people — the sine qua non of personal monarchy, and an attribute which had been signally lacking in Henry VI.
When Edward died on 9 April 1483 he was the undisputed master of England. Within three months of his death his twelve-year-old heir, Edward V, had been deposed, and the duke of Gloucester had taken the throne as Richard III. The deposition of a minor was unprecedented, and it has been argued that the explanation must lie in the previous reign. Edward’s willingness to build up the power of his associates has been blamed for creating factional conflict within his court — and for giving the protagonists the power to translate their animosities into violent action once his own controlling hand was removed. On this argument, the young Edward V was the victim of long-standing hostility to the Woodvilles, with whom he was so closely linked that their political eclipse could only be made permanent by his deposition.
There is, however, very little evidence of factional conflict on this scale, either before or after Edward’s death. In the course of the 1470s the Woodvilles had been largely assimilated into the political world, helped by less aggressive royal patronage on their behalf. Contemporaries clearly felt deep anxiety about how the political balance would be affected by Edward’s death, and this inevitably had a bearing on the situation as it unfolded between April and June; but it is Gloucester who emerged as the real driving force in those months. At the end of April he took possession of the young king and declared himself Protector. Less than two months later he announced that his brother’s marriage had been bigamous, its offspring illegitimate, and that he was the rightful heir to the throne. He was crowned on 6 July.
The underlying justification for Richard’s action, emphasised in his public pronouncements, was that he was the man who could ensure the safe continuance of his brother’s regime. This tacit recognition of the vulnerability of Edward’s achievements in the hands of a child probably led the political community to welcome Gloucester’s assumption of the Protectorate, even if (as seems likely) it represented a departure from the dead king’s own wishes. But it was not an argument which could validate something as radical as a deposition. Although Richard was careful to practise what he preached, and the early months of his reign were characterised by almost total continuity with his brother’s regime, opposition to him began immediately. A plan to rescue Edward V and his brother was uncovered in July, and in October rebellion erupted throughout southern England.
The rebellion reveals how totally Richard’s usurpation had destabilised politics. Most of those involved were former servants of Edward IV. Some, notably the Woodvilles, had been removed from power by Richard and their opposition was predictable, but many had been continued in favour and had no material reason for disaffection. The rising also drew in a handful of former Lancastrians who had lost land in the previous reign and who now — for the first time in over a decade — saw rebellion as a viable strategy. The rebels’ initial aim was the restoration of Edward V, and it was probably in response to the July conspiracy that Richard ordered his nephews’ death. Any setback to the rebels’ plans was short-lived. By September a new rival to Richard had emerged in the person of Henry Tudor, the son of Margaret Beaufort and Henry VI’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor. That his dynastic claims could be taken seriously at all, let alone by Yorkists, reveals better than anything the profound dislocation brought about by Richard’s usurpation.
The rebellion posed a major threat to the new regime, and Richard was fortunate that internal tensions led to its collapse before it could gather momentum. Its failure brought the king a few months of unchallenged rule, during which he presided over a notably acquiescent parliament. But the lack of a military resolution meant that opposition had been postponed, rather than overcome. The rebellion also brought Richard new problems. As in the early 1460s, there was now an acknowledged rival beyond the king’s reach. Henry Tudor had made good his escape to Brittany, and Richard immediately commenced negotiations for his surrender. By the summer of 1484 these were close to success, but Henry was warned and managed to escape to France.
The rebellion had also demonstrated Richard’s weakness in the southern counties, where the network of household men created by Edward IV had been fatally compromised. With no time, and little inclination, to build up a following among the local gentry who had escaped involvement, Richard used the land and office forfeited by the rebels to ‘plant’ his own servants (many of whom were from the north of England) in the areas affected by the rebellion. Although this gave him a ready-made household presence in the southern counties, the imposition of outsiders triggered fierce local resentment, and laid Richard open to accusations of ruling in the interests of a clique.
In the summer of 1484 there was further unrest in the south. None of it amounted to very much, but it added to a sense that the regime was vulnerable. By late autumn men hitherto prepared to back Richard were reconsidering their allegiance, and there were defections in England and, more worryingly, among the Calais garrison. Yorkist support for Henry Tudor had been encouraged by his promise, made at Christmas 1483, to marry Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth. Richard paid tribute to the force of the move by considering marriage to her himself, after the death of his first wife early in 1485.
But the main boost to Tudor’s credibility was his flight to France in 1484. Unlike Brittany, France had the resources and the motive to back military action against Richard III. England and France had been in a state of near war since the spring of 1483. In December 1482 France and Burgundy had finally reached agreement at the Treaty of Arras, after it had become apparent that England was not prepared to help Burgundy against France. The agreement allowed Louis XI to abandon the terms of the Treaty of Picquigny, agreed with Edward after an English army had invaded France in 1475. This diplomatic setback enraged Edward IV, and when he died in April 1483 he was actively planning the dispatch of an expeditionary force to Brittany. Although the scheme had to be abandoned, France evidently feared that Richard planned to reactivate it, and Tudor accordingly offered a useful means of distracting him.
Tudor invaded in August 1485, and met the king’s army just south of Market Bosworth (Leics) on 22 August. Richard’s forces, weakened by treachery, were defeated and the king himself killed in a battle traditionally regarded as one of the turning-points of English history. The verdict of Bosworth on Richard III is, however, far from clear. The composition of the royal forces demonstrates the extent to which Richard was still reliant on the men who had helped to bring him to power in 1483, but his was the larger army and he came very close to victory; while Henry Tudor only arrived at the battlefield at all thanks to French and Scottish backing. If men did not much want to fight for Richard III, they were clearly no more enthusiastic about Tudor; and perhaps the one incontrovertible lesson of the battle is that after a generation of war men were no longer willing to risk their lives and livelihoods.
Yet Richard should have been able to call on wider support after two years as king (as Henry VII demonstrated at the battle of Stoke in 1487) and his failure to do so suggests real disenchantment with him and his regime. There were immediate reasons for this unpopularity, notably the affront to local sensibilities caused by the ‘plantation’ of northerners in the south. Even more fundamental was the perception that it had been Richard who, after the stability of Edward IV’s last years, had triggered the return to political conflict — and had done so, moreover, for what could (with whatever justice) be seen as essentially selfish motives. Richard’s strategy for preserving the stable government of his brother was indistinguishable, in practice, from a desire to preserve his own pre-eminence in the Yorkist polity.