The two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, came now, on the first return of peace, to quarrel at the very foot of the throne for the vast property of Warwick. Edward would fain have forgotten everything else in his pleasures. The blood upon his own hands gave him no concern; he was only anxious to devote his leisure hours to Jane Shore, the silversmith's wife, whom he had, like numbers of other ladies, seduced from her duty. But Clarence and Gloucester broke through his gaieties with their wranglings and mutual menaces.
The fact was, that Clarence having, as we have seen, married Isabella, the eldest daughter, was determined, if possible, to monopolise all the property of Warwick, as if the eldest daughter were sole heiress. But Gloucester, who was always on the look out for his own aggrandisement, now cast his eyes on Anne, the other daughter, who had been married to the Prince of Wales. Clarence, aware that he should have a daring and a lawless rival in Gloucester, in regard to the property, opposed the match with all his might. On this point they rose to high words and much heat. Clarence declared at length that Richard might marry Anne if he pleased, but that he should have no share whatever in the property; but only let Richard get the lady, and he would soon possess himself of the lands. The question was debated by the two brothers with such fury before the council, that civil war was anticipated.
All this time the property was rightfully that of the widow of Warwick, the mother of the two young ladies. Anne, the Countess of Warwick, was the sole heiress of the vast estates of the Despensers and the Beauchamps, Earls of Warwick. To all the great court party, who had once been her friends—as the world calls friendship—and many of them her humble flatterers and admirers, she applied from her sanctuary at Beaulieu, in the most moving terms, for their kind aid in obtaining a modicum of freedom and support out of her own lands, the most wealthy in England. But it was not her that the two princes courted, it was her property; and nobody dared or cared to move a finger in favour of the once great Anne of Warwick. The daughter, Anne, so far from desiring to marry Richard of Gloucester, detested him. Cooperating, therefore, with the wishes and interests of Clarence, she, by his assistance, escaped out of the sanctuary of Beaulieu, where she had been with the countess, her mother, and disappeared. For some time no trace of her could be discovered; but Gloucester had his spies and emissaries everywhere; and, at length, the daughter of Warwick, and the future queen of England, was found in the guise of a cookmaid in London. Gloucester removed her to the sanctuary of St. Martin's-le-Grand. Afterwards she was allowed to visit her uncle, the Archbishop of York, before his disgrace, and the Queen Margaret in the Tower. All this was probably conceded by Gloucester in order to win Anne's favour; but Anne still repelling with disgust his addresses, he refused her these solaces, and procuring the removal of her mother from Beaulieu, sent her, under the escort of Sir John Tyrrell, into the north, where he is said to have kept her confined till his own death, even while she was his mother-in-law. Anne was at length compelled to marry the hated Gloucester; and her hatred appeared to increase from nearer acquaintance, for she was soon after praying for a divorce.
BURIAL OF KING HENRY. (See p. [36].)
The king was compelled to award to Gloucester a large share of Warwick's property; and the servile Parliament passed an act in 1474, embodying the disgraceful commands of these most unnatural and unprincipled princes. The two daughters were to succeed to the Warwick property, as though their mother, the possessor in her own right, were dead. If either of them should die before her husband, he should continue to retain her estates during his natural life. If a divorce should take place between Richard and Anne, for which Anne was striving, Richard was still to retain her property, provided he married or did his best to marry her to some one else. Thus, by this most iniquitous arrangement, while Richard kept his wife's property, they made it a motive with her to force her into some other alliance, if not so hateful, perhaps more degrading. It is impossible to conceive the tyranny of vice and selfishness carried farther than in these odious transactions. But this was not all. There was living a son of the Marquis of Montague, Warwick's brother; and to prevent any claim from him as next heir male, all such lands as he might become the claimant of were tied upon Clarence and Gloucester, and their heirs, so long as there should remain any heirs male of the marquis. By these means did these amiable brothers imagine that they had stepped into the full and perpetual possession of the enormous wealth of the great Warwick. Edward, having rather smoothed over than appeased the jealousies of his brothers, now turned his ambition to foreign conquest.
In all his contests at home, Edward had shown great military talents. He had fought ten battles, and never lost one; for at the time of the treason of Lord Montague in 1470, he had not fought at all, but, deserted by his army, had fled to Flanders. He had always entertained a flattering idea that he could emulate the martial glory of the Edwards and of Henry V., and once more recover the lost territories of France, and the lost prestige of the British arms on the Continent. His relations with France and Burgundy were such as encouraged this roseate notion. Louis XI. had supported the claims of Henry, and accomplishing the alliance of Margaret and his most formidable enemy Warwick, had sent them to push him from his throne. The time appeared to be arrived for inflicting full retribution. Burgundy was his brother-in-law, and had aided him in recovering his crown. True, the assistance of Burgundy had not been prompted by love to him, but by enmity to Warwick and Louis; nor had his reception of him in his distress been such as to merit much gratitude, but he did not care to probe too deeply into the motives of the prince; the great matter was, that Burgundy was the antagonist of Louis, and their interests were, therefore, the same.
The Duke of Burgundy, formerly Count of Charolais—called Charles le Téméraire, or the Bold—was no match for the cold and politic Louis XI. He and his ally, the Duke of Brittany, fancied themselves incapable of standing their ground against Louis, and now made an offer of mutual alliance to Edward, for the purpose of enforcing their common claims in France. Nothing could accord more with the desires of Edward than this proposition. He had employed 1473 in settling his disputes with the Hanse Towns, in confirming the truce with Scotland, and renewing his alliances with Portugal and Denmark. His Parliament had granted him large supplies. They voted him a tenth of rents, or two shillings in the pound, calculated to produce at that day £31,460, equal to more than £300,000 of our present money. They then added to this a whole fifteenth, and three-quarters of another. But when Edward entered into the scheme of Burgundy and Brittany for the French conquest, they granted him permission to raise any further moneys by what were called benevolences, or free gifts—a kind of exaction perhaps more irksome than any other, because it was vague, arbitrary, and put the advances of the subjects on the basis of loyalty. Such a mode of fleecing the people had been resorted to under Henry III. and Richard II. Now there was added a clause to the Act of Parliament, providing that the proceeds of the fifteenth should be deposited in religious houses, and, if the French campaign should not take place, should be refunded to the people: as if any one had ever heard of taxes, once obtained, ever being refunded to the payers!
All being in readiness, Edward passed over from Sandwich to Calais, where he landed on the 22nd of June, 1475. He had with him 1,500 men-at-arms, and 15,000 archers, an army with which the former Edwards would have made Louis tremble on his throne. He dispatched Garter-king-at-arms with a letter of defiance to Louis, demanding nothing less than the crown of France. The position of Louis was to all appearance most critical. If Burgundy, Brittany, and the Count of St. Pol, the Constable of France, who had entered into the league against him, had acted wisely and faithfully together, the war must have been as dreadful, and the losses of France as severe, as in the past days. But probably Louis was well satisfied of the crumbling character of the coalition. Comines, who was at the time in the service of Louis, has left us ample accounts of these transactions and, according to them, the conduct of the French king was masterly in the extreme. Instead of firing with resentment at the proud demands of the letter, he took the herald politely into his private closet, and there, in the most courteous and familiar manner, told him he was sorry for this misunderstanding with the King of England; that, for his part, he had the highest respect for Edward, and desired to be on amicable terms with him, but that he knew very well that all this was stirred up by the Duke of Burgundy and the Constable St. Pol, who would be the very first to abandon Edward, if any difficulty arose, or after they had got their own turn served. He put it to the herald how much better it would be for England and France to be on good terms, and gave the greatest weight to his arguments by smilingly placing in Garter's hand a purse of 300 crowns, assuring him that if he used his endeavours effectually to preserve the peace between the two kingdoms, he would add to it a thousand more.
The herald was so completely captivated by the suavity, the sound reasons, and the money of Louis, that he promised to do everything in his power to promote a peace, and advised the king to open a correspondence with the Lords Howard and Stanley, noblemen not only high in the favour of Edward, but secretly adverse to this expedition. This being settled, Louis committed Garter-king-at-arms to the care of Philip de Comines, telling him to give the herald publicly a piece of crimson velvet thirty ells in length, as though it were the only present, and to get him away as soon as he could, with all courtesy, without allowing him to hold any communication with the courtiers. This being done, Louis summoned his great barons and the rest of the courtiers around him, and ordered the letter of defiance to be read aloud, all the time sitting with a look of the greatest tranquillity, for he was himself much assured by what he had heard from the herald.