lieutenants. But the duke of Clarence betrayed to his brother
the army which he had gathered in King Henry’s name, and
Battle of Barnet. Death of Warwick.
many of the Lancastrians were slow to join the earl,
from their distrust of his loyalty. Edward, dashing
through the midst of the slowly gathering levies of
his opponents, seized London, and two days later
defeated and slew Warwick at the battle of Barnet (April 13,
1471).
On that same day Queen Margaret and her son landed at
Weymouth, only to hear that the earl was dead and
his army scattered. But she refused to consider the
struggle ended, and gathered the Lancastrians of the
west for a final rally. On the Battle of Tewkesbury. Death of Edward, prince of Wales.
Capture of Queen Margaret and murder of Henry VI.
fatal day of Tewkesbury
(May 3, 1471) her army was beaten, her son
was slain in the flight, and the greater part of her
chief captains were taken prisoner. She herself was
captured next day. The victorious Edward sent to the block
the last Beaufort duke of Somerset, and nearly all
the other captains of rank, whether Lancastrians or
followers of Warwick. He then moved to London,
which was being threatened by Kentish levies raised
in Warwick’s name, delivered the city, and next day
caused the unhappy Henry VI. to be murdered in the
Tower (May 21, 1471).
The descendants of Henry IV. were now extinct, and the succession question seemed settled for ever. No one dreamed of raising against King Edward the claims of the remoter heirs of John of Gaunt—the young earl of Richmond, who represented the Beauforts by a female Edward IV. descent, or the king of Portugal, the grandson of Gaunt’s eldest daughter. Edward was now king indeed, with no over-powerful cousin at his elbow to curb his will. He had, moreover, at his disposal plunder almost as valuable as that which he had divided up in 1461—the estates of the great Neville clan and their adherents. A great career seemed open before him; he had proved himself a fine soldier and an unscrupulous diplomatist; he was in the very prime of life, having not yet attained his thirty-first year. He might have devoted himself to foreign politics and have rivalled the exploits of Edward III. or Henry V.—for the state of the continent was all in his favour—or might have set himself to organize an absolute monarchy on the ruins of the parliament and the baronage. For the successive attainders of the Lancastrians and the Nevilles had swept away many of the older noble families, and Edward’s house of peers consisted for the main part of new men, his own partisans promoted for good service, who had not the grip on the land that their predecessors had possessed.
But Edward either failed to see his opportunity or refused to
take it. He did not plunge headlong into the wars of Louis XI.
and Charles of Burgundy, nor did he attempt to recast
the institutions of the realm. He settled down into
inglorious ease, varied at long intervals by outbursts
Character of the reign.
of spasmodic tyranny. It would seem that the key
to his conduct was that he hated the hard work without which
a despotic king cannot hope to assert his personality, and
preferred leisure and vicious self-indulgence. In many ways
the later years of his reign were marked with all the signs of
absolutism. Between 1475 and 1483 he called only one single
parliament, and that was summoned not to give him advice,
or raise him money, but purely and solely to attaint his brother, the duke
of Clarence, whom he had resolved to destroy. The
Murder of
the duke of Clarence.
duke’s fate (Feb. 17, 1478) need provoke no sympathy,
he was a detestable intriguer, and had given his brother
just offence by a series of deeds of high-handed violence
and by perpetual cavilling. But he had committed no act of
real treason since his long-pardoned alliance with Warwick,
and was not in any way dangerous; so that when the king
caused him to be attainted, and then privately murdered in the
Tower, there was little justification for the fratricide.
Edward was a thrifty king; he was indeed the only medieval monarch of England who succeeded in keeping free of debt and made his revenue suffice for his expenses. But his methods of filling his purse were often unconstitutional and sometimes ignominious. When the resources drawn from confiscations Fiscal policy. were exhausted, he raised “benevolences”—forced gifts extracted from men of wealth by the unspoken threat of the royal displeasure—instead of applying to parliament for new taxes. But his most profitable source of revenue was drawn from abroad. Having allied himself with his brother-in-law Charles of Burgundy against the king of France, he led an army into Picardy in 1475, and then by the treaty of Picquigny sold peace to Louis XI. for 75,000 gold crowns down, and an annual pension (or tribute as he preferred to call it) of 50,000 crowns more. It was regularly paid up to the last year of his reign. Charles the Bold, whom he had thus deliberately deserted in the middle of their joint campaign, used the strongest language about this mean act of treachery, and with good cause. But the king cared not when his pockets were full. Another device of Edward for filling his exchequer was a very stringent enforcement of justice; small infractions of the laws being made the excuse for exorbitant fines. This was a trick which Henry VII. was to turn to still greater effect. In defence of both it may be pleaded that after the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses a strong hand was needed to restore security for life and property, and that it was better that penalties should be over-heavy rather than that there should be no penalties at all. Another appreciable source of revenue to Edward was his private commercial ventures. He owned many ships, and traded with great profit to himself abroad, because he could promise, as a king, advantages to foreign buyers and sellers with which no mere merchant could compete.
During the last period of Edward’s rule England might have been described as a despotism, if only the king had cared to be a despot. But except on rare occasions he allowed his power to be disguised under the old machinery of the medieval monarchy, and made no parade of his autocracy. Much was pardoned by the nation to one who gave them comparatively efficient and rather cheap government, and who was personally easy of access, affable and humorous. It is with little justification that he has been called the “founder of the new monarchy,” and the spiritual ancestor of the Tudor despotism. Another king in his place might have merited such titles, but Edward was too careless, too unsystematic, too lazy, and too fond of self-indulgence to make a real tyrant. He preferred to be a man of pleasure and leisure, only awaking now and then to perpetrate some act of arbitrary cruelty.
England was not unprosperous under him. The lowest point of her fortunes had been reached under the administration of Margaret of Anjou, during the weary years that preceded the outbreak of the civil wars in 1459. At that time the government had been bankrupt, foreign Condition of the country. trade had almost disappeared, the French and pirates of all nations had possession of the Channel, and the nation had lost heart, because there seemed no way out of the trouble save domestic strife, to which all looked forward with dismay. The actual war proved less disastrous than had been expected. It fell heavily upon the baronage and their retainers, but passed lightly, for the most part, over the heads of the middle classes. The Yorkists courted the approval of public opinion by their careful avoidance of pillage and requisitions; and the Lancastrians, though less scrupulous, only once launched out into general raiding and devastation, during the advance of the queen’s army to St Albans in the early months of 1461. As a rule the towns suffered little or nothing—they submitted to the king of the moment, and were always spared by the victors. It is one of the most curious features of these wars that no town ever stood a siege, though there were several long and arduous sieges of baronial castles, such as Harlech, Alnwick and Bamborough. Warwick, with his policy of conciliation for the masses and hard blows for the magnates, was mainly responsible for this moderation. In battle he was wont to bid his followers spare the commons in the pursuit, and to smite only the knights and nobles. Towton, where the Yorkist army was infuriated by the harrying of the Midlands by their enemies in the preceding
