The king then found it convenient to create a foreign crisis; it helped him to raise money for his own purposes and to unite his subjects in common enmity. In the spring of 1462 he claimed that the new king of France, Louis XI, was set to destroy ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English of this our said realm’. Edward can be considered the first English king who eschewed France altogether; he had no French possessions to defend, other than the garrison town of Calais, and was truly king of England only.
In the following year the exchequer was asked to provide the requisite funds to raise an army and a fleet against his manifold enemies at home and abroad. It was supposed that the king would march against the Lancastrian supporters in Northumberland and elsewhere, or that he would invade Scotland; in the event, none of this came to pass. He did not lead his troops into battle. ‘What a wretched outcome,’ one fifteenthcentury chronicler reported, ‘shame and confusion!’ Yet it would be wrong to consider Edward as an inactive king. He arranged truces both with France and with Scotland. He took his court to York, and from there he supervised the slow domination of the northern shires.
From the beginning Edward proved himself to be a strong king; he was an expert administrator and had concluded that the survival of his throne depended upon financial and political stability. In an age of personal kingship this was necessarily a very heavy burden on the monarch, whose presence was required everywhere and whose authority had to be imposed directly. He kept a close scrutiny on commerce and on his customs revenues; he summoned members of the London guilds in order to guide or harangue them. Thousands of petitions were delivered to him every year. It was said that he knew ‘the names and estates’ of nearly all the people ‘dispersed throughout the shires of this kingdom’, even those of mere gentlemen. A king who had won his throne by force could not be aloof or detached; he had to remain at the centre of human affairs. He needed goodwill as well as obedience. That is why Dominic Mancini described him as being ‘easy of access’. It has been said that Edward began the movement towards the ‘centralized monarchy’ that characterized the Tudor period; but in truth he had little choice in the matter. It was not a bureaucratic or administrative decision; it was personal instinct.
He had an interest in the administration of justice, too, and in the first fifteen years of his reign he travelled all over the kingdom for his judicial visitations. In the first five months of 1464, for example, he attended the courts at Coventry and Worcester, Gloucester and Cambridge and Maidstone. Several reasons can be adduced for this activity. Pre-eminent among them was his effort to check or punish violence between the noble families; he had a personal interest in preventing riot or disorder that might threaten the security of the various counties. He intervened in a struggle between the Greys and the Vernons of Derbyshire, for example, and closely interviewed the retainers of both sides. He made much use of the commission known as ‘oyer et terminer’, designed to hear and determine felonies or misdemeanours in an expeditious manner. It was composed of his own men, from the household or from the court, and of local magnates who could not be easily coerced.
The commissioners were not always successful, however, in summoning witnesses. The senior knights of Herefordshire confessed to them that ‘they dare not present nor say the truth of the defaults before rehearsed, for dread of murdering, and to be mischieved in their own houses, considering the great number of the said misdoers …’. In the early years of Edward’s reign, when the final outcome of the struggle between the Yorkists and Lancastrians was still in doubt, private violence had by no means abated.
The king’s own legal practice, however, was far from perfect. He regularly interfered with the process of the courts to ensure favourable judgments in the interests of his most powerful supporters. He never prosecuted the retainers of those men upon whose loyalty he relied. This was of course not an unusual procedure for any king, whose rule relied more upon realpolitik than any judicial principle. Edward also had a vested interest in efficient or at least swift justice, since the revenues of the courts greatly augmented his income.
Another aspect of his character can be noted. One contemporary chronicler remarked that he had a liking for ‘convivial company, vanity, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyment’. These do not seem to be mortal offences in any king but, rather, the proper setting for the projection of authority and sovereignty. In the next sentence, after all, the chronicler goes on to praise the king’s acute memory and attention to detail. Yet Edward made one decision in his private affairs that had more serious consequences. In the spring of 1464 he secretly united himself with a commoner in a marriage that emphasized his passion rather than his judgment. Elizabeth Woodville was a widow with two children; and, unlike most royal brides, she was English. She was not altogether common, however, since her father was a knight and her mother a widowed duchess. It was reported that, having decided that she would be a queen rather than a royal mistress, she had resisted the king’s advances. Edward was known to be libidinous and to have had many sexual liaisons, but it seems that Elizabeth was the first to have refused him. A rumour spread through the courts of Europe that in desperation he had even put a knife against her throat. Yet she held out, to her ultimate satisfaction.
The king’s choice was a cause of some dismay to those who believed that a king should only marry someone of royal blood. The fact that he married her in secret, slipping away from his courtiers on the first day of May 1464 with the pretence of going hunting, suggests that he himself knew that he had married beneath his rank. It was also believed preferable to marry a virgin. A newsletter from Bruges in the autumn of 1464 observed that ‘the greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied at this and, for the sake of finding means to annul it, all the nobles are holding great consultations in the town of Reading where the king is’. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, had already begun negotiations with the French king on the matter of Edward’s marriage to Louis XI’s sister-in-law. Those plans were now in disarray. The ‘consultations’ of the lords, however, were meaningless. As a friend of Warwick remarked, ‘we must be patient despite ourselves’. On 29 September 1464, Warwick and the duke of Clarence, the king’s younger brother, escorted Elizabeth Woodville into the chapel of Reading Abbey where she was honoured by the assembled company as their lawful queen.
In the following summer Henry VI was captured; since the defeat at Towton he had retreated to Scotland and to the various loyalist castles of northern England. He was effectively a king in hiding, and such was his invisibility that Edward was not sure in which county he was being concealed. Margaret, in the meantime, had taken refuge on her father’s lands in Anjou. The old king was seen at a dinner given by his supporters in Ribblesdale; he fled the area, but was betrayed by a monk. He was eventually caught in a wood known as Clitherwood, just on the border of Lancashire, and taken back to London on horseback with his legs tied to the stirrups; it is reported that he wore a straw hat, and was pelted with rubbish by some abusive citizens. He remained in the Tower for the next five years, with a small party of courtiers enlisted to serve the prisoner known only as Henry of Windsor.
The new queen’s family, the Woodvilles, were in the ascendant at court and might be seen to threaten the position of Warwick and the other Nevilles. The king also arranged a series of marriages between Elizabeth’s immediate relatives and various available aristocrats; since she had five brothers and seven sisters, this diminished the prospect of further patronage for many more distinguished families. Her younger brother, for example, was married off at the age of twenty to the sixty-five-year-old duchess of Norfolk; the duchess was a wealthy widow who had already buried three husbands, but she also happened to be the aunt of Warwick himself. Warwick’s feelings at what was described at the time as a ‘maritagium diabolicum’ are not recorded. He would have been justified in thinking, in the language of the time, that the honour of his family had been disparaged and that his elderly relative had been made to look ridiculous. In fact the old lady outlived her young spouse, who ended on the scaffold. Louis XI disclosed the fact that he had received a letter expressing Warwick’s dismay at Edward’s behaviour; he hinted that Warwick might even try to supplant his sovereign, but all is lost in a mist of diplomatic surmise and posturing. The French king was not known for nothing as ‘the spider king’.