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Edward IV (1442-1483), king of England and lord of Ireland, was born
at Rouen, Normandy, on 28 April 1442, the second surviving child and
eldest son of Richard, third duke of York (1411-1460), and Cecily,
duchess of York (1415-1495), the daughter of Ralph Neville, first
earl of Westmorland, and Joan Beaufort.

Early life, 1442-1461

Edward probably assumed his father's title of earl of March (no patent
of creation survives) late in 1445, when negotiations were under way
for his marriage to a daughter of Charles VII of France. Little is
known of his early childhood, but it does not seem to have been spent
in the household of another lord or of the king. He and his younger
brother Edmund were certainly based at their father's castle of Ludlow
by spring 1454, and were probably already living there in May 1452,
when one of the Kent rebels was accused of spreading the unlikely
story that the earl of March (then aged ten) was coming with a great
number of Welshmen. Although one chronicler claims that March was
present at the first battle of St Albans, the first certain evidence
of his involvement in his father's opposition to the circle around
Henry VI is his flight from Ludford Bridge in October 1459. Edward
accompanied his uncle the earl of Salisbury, and Salisbury's son
Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, to Calais, while York and Edmund
went to Ireland. All five men were attainted in the parliament that
met at Coventry the following month.

In 1460 the 'Calais earls' invaded England, landing in Kent and
entering London on 2 July. On 10 July Warwick and March gained
possession of Henry VI by defeating the Lancastrian army at the battle
of Northampton, and returned with him to London. For the rest of the
summer the earls and their allies ruled in Henry's name. The dominant
figure in this arrangement was apparently Warwick, although he seems
to have been careful to defer to March, and it was March who remained
in London while Warwick was in the midlands in September. Nor did
Edward accompany his mother to meet York, who had landed near Chester
early in September. By the time York entered London, bearing the
undifferenced royal arms, it was obvious that he had resolved to claim
the throne for himself. Although Edward had not been a party to the
earlier meetings of York and Warwick at Waterford and Shrewsbury, he
was presumably aware of his father's intentions, and it is unlikely
that, as Waurin claims, he tried to persuade York to abandon them. But
he may have realized that public opinion was against the duke, and he
seems to have kept a low profile in the ensuing negotiations. In the
end a compromise was achieved whereby York and his heirs were to
succeed Henry on the king's death, and on 31 October March joined York
in swearing that they would do nothing against the person or estate of
the king.

It was clear, however, that this agreement, which disinherited Edward
of Lancaster, the prince of Wales, would generate the immediate
opposition of the queen and her circle. Edward was sent to the Welsh
march to prevent the earl of Pembroke joining forces with the queen,
while York and Edmund went north, where they were killed by the
queen's forces at the battle of Wakefield on 30 December. Queen
Margaret led her army south, defeating Warwick at the second battle of
St Albans on 17 February, although she turned back without entering
London. By then, March had defeated the Lancastrian forces led by
Pembroke and Wiltshire at the battle of Mortimer's Cross on 2 or 3
February. He subsequently joined forces with Richard Neville in the
Cotswolds, and they entered London together on 26 February. On 1 March
the chancellor, Warwick's brother George Neville, declared Edward's
title to the throne at a gathering at St George's Fields, reportedly
to acclaim. Two days later a 'council' of Yorkist allies meeting at
Baynard's Castle (the London house of the dukes of York) agreed that
Edward should be king, and on the next day (4 March) Edward took his
seat at Westminster and began his reign.

Securing the throne, 1461-1465

Although events in London were no doubt carefully stage-managed,
Edward's accession reveals how thoroughly the situation had changed
since his father had first declared his claim to the throne in the
previous October. In part, this surely owed something to Edward's
succession to his father. Richard of York, like Margaret of Anjou, had
become too closely linked with faction for his victory to offer much
hope of ending the civil war. Edward could more plausibly offer to
unite the warring factions-and his readiness to welcome former
Lancastrians into his service was to be a characteristic of the early
months of his reign. In the short term, however, he needed to
establish himself by military success. He and his allies began raising
money and men immediately, and confronted the Lancastrian forces at
Towton on Palm Sunday (29 March). Although the Lancastrian army was
the larger, it was decisively defeated. Edward returned to London on
26 June, after a progress through the northern counties, and was
crowned at Westminster two days later.

Although the thoroughness of the Yorkist victory forced the tacit
acknowledgement of Edward's title by all but the most committed
Lancastrians, his position was far from entirely secure. Henry VI,
with his wife, had remained at York during the battle and had fled to
Scotland on receiving news of the Lancastrian defeat. Edward IV,
uniquely among medieval usurpers, thus began his reign with his
predecessor not just alive but still at large: a situation that
inevitably undermined Yorkist authority. The early years of the reign
saw almost continuous military involvement in the north of England,
where the Lancastrians could call on Scottish support, and in Wales.
Edward himself played relatively little part in the campaigns. He did
lead the great army assembled late in 1462 in response to the loss of
Bamburgh, Alnwick, and Dunstanburgh, but fell ill with measles at
Durham in November, and leadership passed to the earl of Warwick. In
the following summer it was expected that Edward would lead a major
campaign into Scotland in response to continuing Scottish support for
the Lancastrians, but although practical preparations were still in
train late in August, and the king moved into Yorkshire in September,
no military operations followed. Edward also played no part in the
campaigns of 1464, which culminated in the defeat of the Lancastrians
at Hexham, followed by the surrender of the remaining Lancastrian
fortresses in Northumberland, although he had, again, been making
preparations to go north in person.

Military activity was only one facet of Edward's attempt to establish
himself as the rightful and effective ruler of England. Another,
perhaps Edward's preferred strategy, was his commitment to winning
over opponents. From the outset of his reign Edward showed himself
willing to take former Lancastrians into his favour, on little more
than their assurances of future good behaviour. Given the narrowness
of his power base in 1461, such a policy had obvious practical
advantages, but it perhaps also marked a deliberate attempt by the
king to restore political life to normality after the factionalism of
the previous decade. The policy had some dramatic failures, most
notably Sir Ralph Percy and the duke of Somerset, whom Edward took
into his service in spite of their strong Lancastrian links, and who
afterwards reneged. But in general men were as eager to support the de
facto king as he was to have their backing, and it is a measure of the
policy's success that in July 1465 Henry VI was finally betrayed and
captured in Lancashire, the hereditary heartland of his dynasty.

Edward's marriage and its consequences, 1465-1467

Alongside Edward IV's search for domestic security went the need to
secure recognition for his dynasty in Europe. In the context of the
early 1460s the obvious opening for England onto the European stage
was the growing tension between France, on the one side, and the dukes
of Burgundy and Brittany on the other, as Louis XI attempted to exert
his authority over the duchies. The value to both sides of acquiring
English backing, or at least denying it to their opponents, gave
Edward a European importance that he would otherwise hardly have
deserved, status that would inevitably be diminished once he had
committed himself. In this respect, the fact that by the mid-1460s
Edward was apparently inclining towards a Burgundian alliance, while
Warwick favoured France, often taken as evidence of a growing rift
between Edward and the earl, may have had its diplomatic advantages.
Once it had become clear that Edward had decided for Burgundy,
Charles, count of Charolais, who succeeded his father as duke in June
1467, was able to drive a hard bargain in the negotiations of 1467-8.

The Burgundian alliance was formalized in the marriage of Duke Charles
(formerly Charolais) to Edward's youngest sister, Margaret: the only
one of the Yorkist royal family to make a foreign marriage. Discussion
of possible European brides for Edward and his brothers had been a
feature of earlier diplomacy, but nothing had come of them and Edward
had taken himself out of the running by his secret marriage, on 1 May
1464, to Elizabeth Grey [see Elizabeth (c.1437-1492)], the widow of
John Grey who had died fighting on the Lancastrian side at the second
battle of St Albans. She was the daughter of Richard Woodville, a
former servant of John, duke of Bedford, who had married Bedford's
widow, Jaquetta de Luxembourg, and had been made Earl Rivers in
acknowledgement of his wife's standing. Socially, Edward had married
beneath himself and an important diplomatic opportunity had been lost.
Contemporaries evidently found the marriage surprising, and critics of
the queen's family in 1470-71 put about the story that Edward had been
bewitched by Jaquetta. The more usual explanation, progressively
embroidered by later writers, was that Edward was sexually infatuated
with Elizabeth, who made her submission conditional on marriage.
Edward himself seems to have been rather embarrassed by his action. It
was not until September that he broke the news of his marriage to the
royal council at Reading, and on 29 September Elizabeth was formally
acknowledged as queen, by being escorted into Reading Abbey by
Edward's brother, George, duke of Clarence, and Warwick.

Edward's marriage, and his delay in acknowledging it, laid him open to
accusations of misjudgement and bad faith, the latter not least
because his ambassadors were left negotiating a French match that had
become impossible. But in discussions of the political impact of the
marriage most emphasis is usually placed on the consequences of
finding appropriate preferment for the new queen's family. Elizabeth
brought a large, and largely unmarried, family into the royal circle:
two sons from her first marriage, five brothers, and six sisters.
Within two years Edward had found aristocratic husbands for five of
the queen's sisters, who married the duke of Buckingham, and the heirs
of the earls of Kent, Essex, and Arundel, and of Lord Herbert (later
to become the earl of Pembroke). This series of marriages is unlikely
to have been prompted only by the king's infatuation with his new
wife. With his usual pragmatism Edward was seizing the chance to ally
his dynasty more securely with the English nobility, an interpretation
strengthened by the fact that he showed much less interest in finding
brides for his wife's brothers, although the youngest, John, married
the dowager duchess of Norfolk. The marriages consolidated links with
existing allies of York, such as the Herberts and Bourchiers, and also
forged new alliances with the Staffords and Fitzalans. This is not to
imply that the marriages benefited only the king. By the mid-1460s
Edward was sufficiently secure on the throne for marriage into the
royal family to confer welcome prestige and influence, and the royal
patronage that accompanied several of the marriages should probably be
seen not as the king's attempt to buy the grudging acquiescence of the
noble families concerned, but as the first fruits of an alliance
valued by both sides.

The creation of an enlarged royal circle was, however, also to have
more negative consequences. With hindsight the Woodville marriage
marked a turning point in Edward's first reign, contributing to the
progressive alienation of one of the king's leading allies, the earl
of Warwick. This was probably not immediately apparent. Earlier in the
reign Warwick had coexisted harmoniously with other close associates
of the king, notably William, Lord Hastings, and Richard Fiennes, Lord
Dacre, and there was no obvious reason why this state of affairs
should not continue after the emergence of the Woodvilles as a new
element within the royal circle. Warwick certainly made no overtly
hostile response to Edward's marriage and the Crowland chronicler
believed that the earl initially sought to co-operate with the queen's
kindred. He escorted Elizabeth on her first formal appearance as queen
and stood godfather to the first child of her marriage to Edward, born
in February 1466. Even Warwick's plan to marry his daughter to
Clarence, first mooted at about this time, may be evidence of the
earl's wish to become part of the extended royal family, rather than a
sign that he was already disaffected and was seeking allies against
the Woodvilles.

The disaffection of the Nevilles, 1467-1469

Edward's response to the marriage proposal was, however, unwelcoming,
and in the course of the next few years relations between the two men
cooled noticeably. Warkworth, while linking that loss of affection
with the king's marriage, saw June 1467, when Edward dismissed
Warwick's brother George from the chancellorship, as a crucial stage
in their slide into hostility, commenting 'And yett thei were acorded
diverse tymes; but thei nevere loffyd togedere aftere' (Warkworth,
4). Waurin also saw 1467 as the point of no return, but for him the
issue was Warwick's continuing support for an alliance with France, at
a time when Edward had finally committed himself to supporting
Burgundy and Brittany. But it is likely that both issues were
expressions of a deeper malaise. Later events make it clear that
Warwick had come to feel excluded from the circle around the king, and
resented the influence it wielded.

The political tensions induced by this are reflected in the stirrings
of Lancastrian activity apparent in the late 1460s. In autumn 1467 a
captured Lancastrian claimed that Warwick had made contact with
Margaret of Anjou, and in the following summer another Lancastrian,
Cornelius, implicated a number of prominent Londoners and Warwick's
associate at Calais, John, Lord Wenlock, in his confession. None of
this amounted to very much, and the persistent rumours of the
involvement of Warwick and his circle were probably little more than
wishful thinking on the part of Lancastrian dissidents. But that in
itself is evidence of the importance attached to the earl's growing
disaffection, and the government was clearly uneasy. In 1468 Edward
arrested the surviving representatives of three strongly Lancastrian
families: Henry Courtenay, Thomas Hungerford, and John de Vere, earl
of Oxford. Courtenay and Hungerford were found guilty of plotting the
king's death and executed, but Oxford, Warwick's brother-in-law, was
not brought to trial-evidence, perhaps, that Edward, although aware of
Warwick's manifest disillusionment with the regime, still thought him
fundamentally loyal.

The Neville rebellions, 1469-1470

In 1469 Warwick finally moved into overt opposition, taking with him
Edward's brother and heir, the duke of Clarence. The rebellion began
obliquely. There had been unrest in the north of England from late
April, and although it had been repressed for the king by Warwick's
brother John, the rebels apparently regrouped in June under the
leadership of 'Robin of Redesdale', who was almost certainly an
associate of Warwick and probably one of the Conyers family. At this
stage, however, Warwick had given no sign of support for the rebels,
and Edward seems not to have regarded the rising as particularly
threatening. It was only in mid-June that he decided to raise troops
and go north in person, and not until July that he seems to have
realized the full scale of the opposition.

On 11 July Clarence married Warwick's daughter Isabel at Calais and on
the following day the two lords issued a manifesto, couched as a list
of popular grievances which they had resolved to bring to the king's
attention 'for the honoure and profite of oure seid sovereyn Lord, and
the comune weal of alle this his realme' (Warkworth, 47). The
complaints were directed at named associates of the king: Rivers and
his wife, the earls of Pembroke and Devon, lords Scales and Audley,
Sir John Fogge, and the queen's brothers. They were accused of forcing
up taxes, to make good the financial shortfall their own rapacity had
created, and of maintaining wrongdoers so that the law could not be
enforced. The cure for such misgovernment, the manifesto proclaimed,
was for the king to pay more attention to the counsel of the true
lords of the blood, who had been estranged from the king by the circle
around him.

If the 1469 rising is evaluated in terms of high politics, it is clear
that Warwick and Clarence were extremely isolated, and it is difficult
to see their disaffection as evidence that Edward was guilty of
serious political mismanagement. In particular, although it is
possible to cite examples of Woodville greed and insensitivity,
hostility to the queen's family does not seem to have been a
particularly effective rallying cry among the nobility and gentry at
large. The extent of popular dissatisfaction with the regime is harder
to assess. The rebel lords clearly expected their accusations of
over-taxation and royal laxity in the area of law and order to be well
received, and Warkworth confirms that criticisms of the regime were
current by the late 1460s, although he stresses rather the damage
Edward's policies were thought to have done to English trading
interests. Warwick and Clarence apparently gained significant support
as they advanced through Kent; enough, at least, to persuade London to
open its gates to them and even to give them financial support. It is
unlikely, however, that popular disillusionment alone would have
constituted a major threat to the regime; a view which gains some
support from the ease with which John Neville dispersed the early
manifestations of northern unrest, before the emergence of
aristocratic support for the rising.

Edward was, however, caught unprepared by the rebellion. The rebels
were able to defeat the royal forces under Pembroke and Devon at the
battle of Edgcote on 26 July. The king had not been present at the
battle, and when news of the defeat reached him as he advanced south
from Nottingham he was deserted by many of his men. He was captured by
George Neville and sent as a prisoner first to Warwick Castle and
later to Middleham, Yorkshire. For the next few weeks Warwick and
Clarence attempted to rule England in the king's name; but the
knowledge that the king was a prisoner fatally undermined their
attempts, and the period was marked by a dramatic upsurge in
lawlessness, including an attack by the duke of Norfolk on the
Pastons' castle of Caister, and a flare-up of the dispute between the
Stanleys and the Harringtons in the north-west. When there was a
Lancastrian rising, led by Sir Humphrey Neville of Brancepeth, in the
north, Warwick found himself unable to raise troops to deal with it,
and Edward was able to reassert his freedom of action. He was at York,
apparently at liberty, in the second week of September, and Humphrey
Neville and his brother had been defeated and executed by the end of
the month.

Edward returned to London in the middle of October. Initially he was
careful not to take action against Clarence and Warwick, an approach
that, as described by Polydore Vergil, has clear parallels with his
policy towards the Lancastrians in the early 1460s: 'He regarded
nothing more than to win again the friendship of such noble men as
were now alienated from him [and] to confirm the goodwill of them that
were hovering and inconstant' (Vergil, 125). The famous comment of
John (II) Paston that, although Edward declared Warwick and the rest
to be his best friends, 'hys howsolde men haue other langage' (Davis,
1.410) may imply hostility to Edward's approach within the royal
circle rather than deception on the part of the king. But the leading
rebels cannot have felt secure, particularly as the victims of the
rising had included the queen's father and her brother John, and their
apprehensions can only have been intensified when Edward showed
himself minded to restore Henry Percy to the earldom of
Northumberland, presumably as a counterweight to the Nevilles in the
north. The chief beneficiaries of the Percy forfeiture had been
Clarence and Warwick, and also Warwick's younger brother John, who had
remained loyal to Edward throughout his brother's move into
opposition. Edward was careful to compensate John Neville with a major
new holding in the south-west, where he was given the forfeited
Courtenay lands previously held by another victim of the rising of
1469, Humphrey Stafford, earl of Devon. The grant was testimony to
Edward's confidence that John Neville would be able to assert Yorkist
authority in a notoriously disaffected region, but it represented a
break with Neville's traditional interests in the north, and it was
later to become apparent that Neville had resented the enforced move.

In the short term, however, John Neville remained loyal, as his
brother and Clarence again moved into opposition. In the spring of
1470 the two men exploited opposition in Lincolnshire to a leading
local member of Edward's household, Sir Thomas Burgh, in order to stir
up a rising against the king. Contemporaries seem to have been unsure
of the rebels' intentions: Warkworth implies that the aim was to
restore Henry VI, while the official narrative of the rising and its
suppression claims that it was Clarence who was to become king. It
seems clear, at least, that Warwick and Clarence had abandoned hopes
of forcing themselves on Edward, and were now contemplating removing
him altogether.

Flight and recovery, 1470-1471

The rebellion was a complete failure. The Lincolnshire rebels were
defeated near Empingham, and only the closest associates of Warwick
and Clarence proved willing to support their lords' treason. The two
noblemen and their families fled to France, where they opened
negotiations with Margaret of Anjou for the restoration of Henry VI.
Edward responded by sending secret messengers to Clarence, who had no
reason to welcome a Lancastrian restoration. He also took steps to
secure Calais and the south coast, and, with Burgundian help,
blockaded the French coast. In September 1470, however, the fleet was
scattered by storms, and the rebels, now reinforced by committed
Lancastrians such as Jasper Tudor, and with French backing, invaded
England. They were soon joined by Lord Stanley and the earl of
Shrewsbury and it was a sizeable force that moved north. Edward had
been in the north when the news of the invasion reached him, drawn
thither by risings in the North Riding and Cumberland. He moved south
only slowly, awaiting reinforcements from John Neville. What came
instead was news of Neville's defection and Edward and a group of
followers, including Gloucester, Hastings, and Howard, fled to the Low
Countries, leaving Warwick to enter London unopposed and replace Henry
VI on the throne.

Edward's arrival in Burgundian territory was a considerable
embarrassment for Duke Charles. As part of the price Warwick had paid
for French backing, the new regime in England was committed to support
an invasion of Burgundy, and Charles's initial reaction was to keep
his distance from Edward, to avoid giving the new Anglo-French
alliance any excuse for taking action against him. For the early weeks
of his exile Edward was dependent on the hospitality of Louis de
Gruthuyse (whom he was later, after his restoration, to reward with
the earldom of Winchester). It was only when Louis XI declared war on
Burgundy in December 1470 that Charles abandoned his cautious
neutrality and agreed to support a Yorkist invasion of England. The
preparations for Edward's return were not, however, only military. In
spite of the apparent thoroughness with which Edward's authority had
collapsed, the restoration of Henry VI offered little to many of the
political establishment left behind in England, and Edward could hope
to call on their support once an invasion seemed viable. Members of
the Yorkist royal family were mobilized to put pressure on Clarence to
reconsider his allegiance, and messengers were sent to other possible
allies, including the newly restored earl of Northumberland.

Edward returned to England in March 1471. Initial plans to land in
East Anglia proved abortive, and the Yorkists finally came ashore at
Ravenspur in Holderness on 14 March. The East Riding was Percy
territory, and although Edward seems to have been confident of the
earl's backing, the attitude of the Percy retainers was more
problematic. Edward accordingly moved cautiously, initially claiming
that he had come only for the duchy of York. This claim saw him safely
through east Yorkshire, and as he turned south he began to be joined
by allies, until by the time he had reached Nottingham his forces were
large enough for a Lancastrian army under Exeter and Oxford to fall
back rather than challenge him. On 3 April his forces were swelled by
his conjunction with Clarence, and the Yorkist army entered London
unopposed on 11 April. Edward was reunited with his queen, who during
his exile had remained in Westminster sanctuary, where she had given
birth to their heir, the future Edward V, on 2 November 1470.

On Easter Sunday (14 April) Edward IV defeated Warwick's army at
Barnet. On the same day Margaret of Anjou and her son Edward landed at
Weymouth. She was able to rally significant support from Devon and
Cornwall, and began to advance towards the Welsh march. Edward and his
army aimed to intercept her before she could cross the Severn, and the
two armies met at Tewkesbury on 4 May. The Yorkists were victorious
and Edward of Lancaster was among those killed. This removed the
argument for keeping Henry VI alive, and the Lancastrian king was
killed on the night of Edward IV's victorious return to London,
Yorkist claims that he died of 'pure displeasure and melencoly'
(Bruce, 38) probably then, as now, commanding little credence.

The second reign: the exercise of patronage

As in 1461 Edward IV's title to the throne had been confirmed by
battle. But in one respect the situation in 1471 was very different.
The death of Henry VI and his son meant that there was no longer an
alternative king to validate opposition to the Yorkists.
Contemporaries recognized as much, and Edward's restoration was
followed by the reconciliation of most of the hard core of committed
Lancastrians, like Sir Richard Tunstall, who had remained in
opposition throughout the 1460s. The few exceptions included the
Lancastrian half-blood, now represented by Jasper Tudor and his nephew
Henry, and a handful of men who knew that they had no hope of
regaining their estates under York, such as John de Vere, earl of
Oxford, whose lands had been used to endow the king's younger brother
Richard, duke of Gloucester (afterwards Richard III).

As a result the 'feel' of Edward's two reigns is very different. The
1470s were not without flurries of opposition, most notably in 1473,
when Oxford secured French backing for an abortive invasion, but
Edward looked unassailable in a way that he had not in the 1460s. The
difference between the two reigns does not, however, extend to royal
policy. There is no sense in which the events of 1469-71 had forced
Edward to rethink his strategy, and most of the policies perceived as
characteristic of the 1470s can be paralleled in the preceding decade.

Edward consistently showed himself willing to foster the power of
trusted supporters, who then acted as his agents at a local level. The
best-known example comes from the 1470s, with the elevation of
Gloucester to be lord of the north, but Neville authority in the
region had been built up in a similar way in the 1460s, and in the
same decade William Herbert, later first earl of Pembroke, had become
'King Edward's master-lock' (Griffiths, 159) in south Wales. On a
smaller scale, Edward adopted a similar policy towards leading members
of the local gentry, many of whom had their links with the crown
formalized by membership of the royal household, which was growing
steadily throughout Edward's reign. Contemporaries saw the creation of
this nexus of support as one of Edward's great achievements, and were
particularly impressed by the fact that he knew all his servants, even
those of yeoman status. Nor did the king's knowledge extend only to
his own servants. It is characteristic of Edward that, in delivering a
stinging rebuke to the Mowbray associate William Brandon, he was
reported as saying three times in as many sentences that he understood
or knew Brandon and his dealings 'well j-now' (Davis, 1.544).

Edward's reliance on his local agents was, on the whole, successful,
allowing an effective mediation of royal authority, and it is striking
that although his critics in 1469 attacked the power wielded by a
group of Edward's allies at the centre, the role of his servants
beyond the court never seems to have become a national issue. There
were, inevitably, local grievances, such as the complaint that no
lawyer could be found who was prepared to act against Sir Richard
Croft, one of Edward's key men in Wales in the 1470s, but on the whole
Edward's servants seem to have been seen as the embodiment of
co-operation between king and country, rather than as an intrusive and
alien force.

By contrast, many subsequent commentators have been critical of
Edward's willingness to build up the power of his allies through
grants of office and land, seeing it as tantamount to the creation of
'over mighty subjects'. But none of Edward's leading allies was able
to turn his power fully against the crown. Warwick came nearest, but
although he led his own retinue against Edward in 1469-70, most of the
royal servants over whom he had been given authority by the crown
refused to become involved. It is also clear that what Edward had made
he could break, as is shown by the ruthless demotion of Clarence and
the second earl of Pembroke. Their progressive exclusion from power
points to the negative side of Edward's policy: the imperative to make
things fit, even if that involved the manipulation of landed
interests. The attempt to turn John Neville into a power in the
south-west has already been mentioned, and Edward indulged in a whole
series of reshapings of the political map in 1473-4, including the
replacement of Clarence by Hastings in the north midlands and the
downplaying of Gloucester's role in East Anglia in favour of the
Woodville circle. Edward's decision to mediate authority in Wales,
through a council associated with the prince of Wales, not only
entailed the removal from the region of the second earl of Pembroke
(who was instead given land in the west country), but also the
exclusion of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, after he came of age.

Such manipulation, which at the time went largely unchallenged, is
testimony to Edward IV's authority. It is the king's destruction of
his brother Clarence, however, that demonstrates this most clearly.
Although Clarence had been reconciled with his brother in 1471,
relations between the two men were soured by Clarence's refusal to
co-operate with Edward's plans to endow Gloucester through marriage
with Warwick's second daughter, Anne Neville. In the Act of Resumption
of 1474 Clarence lost the duchy of Lancaster estates in the north
midlands, upon which his influence in that area had rested. Whether
the erosion of his power drove Clarence back into treason has been
disputed; if it did, it is clear that his opposition was entirely
ineffective. But in 1477 he was accused of conspiring against the
crown and in the parliament of January 1478 attainted and subsequently
executed. Although some later writers have tried to distinguish the
hand of others behind Clarence's fall (Tudor writers favouring
Gloucester; P. M. Kendall and other twentieth-century writers
preferring the Woodvilles) contemporaries were in no doubt that it was
Edward who destroyed his own brother. The Crowland chronicler, who
found the episode deeply shocking, commented that in parliament no one
spoke against the duke but the king. As the events of the previous
years had shown, Clarence was an extremely isolated figure, unable to
command much, if any, political support, but it is still striking that
Edward was able first to dismantle the duke's power and then to remove
him altogether.

Domestic policy

The death of Clarence was evidence of the extent to which Edward was,
by the late 1470s, master in his own kingdom, at least in the sphere
of high politics. His success in the wider governmental arena has been
disputed, but here too he seems to have been broadly in control in the
1470s. His most marked, and generally acknowledged, success, was
financial. Throughout his reign, Edward IV explored ways of increasing
his income, and although he has been criticized for allowing rigour to
be tempered by favour, to level such criticism is to misinterpret his
motives. Against a background of rigour, quite modest expressions of
royal favour came to have a higher value than liberal gifts in a laxer
regime. The most striking (and characteristic) example is Edward's use
of parliamentary acts of resumption. A measure forced on Henry VI was
adopted by Edward as, inter alia, a way of granting patronage (in the
form of exemptions) at no additional cost to himself.

Edward consistently sought to maximize his income from the crown
estates, and from royal rights such as wardships or ecclesiastical
vacancies. To handle the revenues from these sources he developed the
royal chamber (which had always had a role in storing and spending the
king's own cash) as a financial agency largely independent of the
exchequer, which, however, retained its traditional responsibility for
other sources of royal finance, such as subsidies, customs (granted to
Edward for life in 1465), and the sheriffs' farms. The chamber
presumably also received the profits of Edward's trading ventures, and
may also have handled the receipts from loans and 'benevolences'. No
accounts survive for the Yorkist chamber, so the scale of Edward's
financial achievement is unknown, but it is significant that in the
1480s he was able to meet the costs of one year of the Scottish war
before resorting to parliamentary taxation. This drained his cash
reserves, although it is impossible to set a value on the royal jewels
and plate, and it may be that contemporaries were right in believing
that Edward died a wealthy man, even though the exchequer and chamber
together held only £1200 at his death.

Contemporary comment on Edward's wealth, and his means of amassing it,
was ambivalent. Solvency was obviously desirable in a ruler,
particularly when it allowed a king to meet his debts promptly and in
cash, but there was always an underlying sense that the king's wealth
was likely to be acquired at the expense of his subjects. Although
Edward's efforts to increase the yield from his own estates could be
seen as good housekeeping, other aspects of his financial dealings
were less popular, notably his resort to benevolences (which were
gifts, rather than loans, from his subjects) before the French and
Scottish wars. Although the great chronicle treats the benevolences
light-heartedly, with the story of a wealthy Suffolk widow who doubled
her contribution in return for a royal kiss, the general perception is
likely to have been closer to the view evoked by Richard III, that
benevolences were 'newe and unlawfull Invencions and inordinate
Covetise, ageyenst the lawe of this roialme' (Luders and others,
2.478).

Contemporaries also seem to have had reservations about the success
with which Edward re-established law and order. Certainly, like any
king, he took action against lawlessness that threatened political
stability, and at this level seems to have been broadly successful. He
imposed a settlement in the Harrington-Stanley dispute, for instance,
which had threatened the good rule of the north-west. His primary
weapon in such cases was his own royal authority, but he also made use
of the royal council and of the constable's court, which was not only
employed against traitors but against those suspected of less extreme
forms of lese-majeste, such as the two London goldsmiths whose dispute
came to the king's attention in 1473. But contemporaries evidently
felt that Edward was less active in cases that did not touch him
personally, and as political unrest subsided in the 1470s, the Commons
became increasingly critical of the regime's apparent failure to take
action against other forms of lawlessness. They pointed the finger at
'such persones as eyther been of grete myght, or elles favoured under
persones of grete power' (RotP, 6.8). Edward was clearly aware of the
hostility to livery and maintenance, but his high-profile campaign
against the system's abuses was not extended to forms of retaining
that might be deemed beneficial to royal authority. Here too, rigour
was moderated by the king's need to cultivate the support of those who
underpinned his regime.

This sort of balancing act was inevitable in a system that ultimately
rested on people rather than institutions, and Edward IV was not alone
in his pragmatism. It has, however, sometimes been suggested that
Edward's reliance on non-institutional structures was excessive, and
that he should have done more to formalize his government, as (it is
often claimed) Henry VII was to do. The extended financial role of the
chamber, for instance, collapsed at Edward's death and had to be
reactivated by Richard III. But it is difficult to argue that this was
a weakness within Edward's own lifetime, when his active involvement
in government can more plausibly be seen as a sign of royal strength.

Foreign policy

Edward IV's growing security at home allowed him to contemplate
military involvement abroad. He had been planning an invasion of
France as early as 1468, when he obtained taxation for that purpose
from parliament, but nothing had come of the proposal, and resentment
at the 'wasted' tax probably fuelled the popular unrest of the
following year. By 1472 the idea of war was again current. In April a
body of English archers was sent to Brittany in response to an appeal
from Duke Francois, and in September the Anglo-Breton treaty of
Chateaugiron made provision for an English invasion in the following
spring, although Brittany was subsequently to withdraw, and in March
1473 Edward made a truce with France. But he continued to prepare for
the war, seeking money from parliament in both 1472 and 1473, and in
1474 finally securing an Anglo-Burgundian alliance against France. In
July 1475 an English army crossed to France, but saw no significant
military action. Charles of Burgundy proved unsupportive, and on 29
August Edward and Louis XI met on a bridge across the Somme at
Picquigny and agreed terms. There was to be a truce for seven years,
and the amity between the countries was to be embodied in the marriage
of the dauphin Charles and Edward's eldest daughter, Elizabeth, or, if
she died before reaching marriageable age, her sister Mary. In
addition Louis undertook to pay Edward £15,000 immediately, and then
an annual pension of £10,000.

In fact, Edward had been bought off, and there was considerable
popular hostility to this latest waste of taxation. But the French
pension helped Edward to do without further parliamentary taxation
until 1482, when war with Scotland placed him under renewed financial
pressure. That war developed unexpectedly after a period of relatively
harmonious relations between the two countries. In October 1473, as
events moved towards the English invasion of France, James III and
Edward had agreed a truce, which was planned to last until 1519 and
which was formalized in the betrothal of the English princess, Cecily,
to James's infant son and namesake, born the previous March. But in
1480 Edward complained about the increasing incidence of truces broken
by the Scots and threatened war if reparation were not made. In May
English military preparations were set in train, but failed to deter a
large-scale raid into the east march by the earl of Angus, which
prompted a counter-raid by Gloucester and Northumberland later in the
year.

By this date Edward was clearly committed to war, and began to plan a
major campaign for the following year, which he was to lead in person.
In the event he did not go, although the planned campaign was not
finally abandoned until October, and the English attack consisted of
little more than a naval raid on the Firth of Forth in the spring and
raids across the land border led by Gloucester later in the year. The
end of 1481 brought a shift in English strategy. Edward decided to put
forward James III's brother, Alexander, duke of Albany, as a rival
claimant to the Scottish throne. By the treaty of Fotheringhay, agreed
on 11 June 1482, England promised military backing in return for
Albany's undertaking (if he won the Scottish throne) to hand over
Berwick, to do homage and fealty to the king of England, and to break
off relations with France.

The intention had been that Edward IV should lead the campaign of 1482
in person, but he again changed his mind and on 12 June Gloucester was
put in effective control of the war. The English army, aided by the
political divisions between James III and his nobility, entered
Edinburgh unopposed, but then withdrew, after Gloucester had secured
an agreement that gave England very little more than Berwick, which
was finally surrendered to the English on 24 August. The immediate
cause of Gloucester's withdrawal was Albany's decision to renounce his
claim to the Scottish throne, but it is curious that the English did
not take more advantage of their position of strength, particularly as
his later career suggests that Gloucester, their commander, was
strongly committed to the war. By the end of the year Albany had had
second thoughts and was again in touch with England, but although
Edward proved willing to reactivate the treaty of Fotheringhay, no
military preparations had been made before Albany again made terms
with his brother on 19 March, and three weeks later Edward IV was dead.

The Scottish war was pursued against the background of an increasingly
complex continental situation. Charles of Burgundy had been killed at
the battle of Nancy in January 1477, and his daughter and heir, Mary,
had married Maximilian, the son of the emperor Friedrich III. In 1480
Edward's sister Margaret, the widow of Duke Charles, had helped to
negotiate an Anglo-Burgundian alliance, a move that prompted Louis to
withhold the latest instalment of Edward's pension, and probably also
to encourage Scottish infractions of the truce. Edward responded by
rebuilding bridges with France, and by the summer of 1481 the
relationship between the two countries was, on the face of it, much as
it had been after Picquigny. For French chroniclers, Edward's motive
was fear that he would lose his pension, but that is unlikely to have
been the whole story. Edward was in no position to take large-scale
military action against France, and he may also have hoped to return
to the situation in the early 1460s, when his diplomacy had centred on
the avoidance of commitment. Whatever his aims, the policy collapsed.
In January 1482 Maximilian, who was unaware of the extent of the
Anglo-French rapprochement, approached Edward for military help
against France. Edward temporized, on the grounds that he was too
heavily committed against Scotland to take action against France. This
lack of English backing, coupled with the death of Mary of Burgundy in
March 1482, drove Burgundy into the arms of France. On 23 December the
two countries came to terms at the treaty of Arras, one of the
conditions of which was that the dauphin should marry Maximilian's
infant daughter, Margaret. Edward IV had lost his pension and his
daughter Elizabeth her promised husband.

Last illness and death

The apparent ineffectiveness of Edward's foreign policy in the closing
years of his reign has led several commentators to suggest that the
king was losing his grip on affairs. There is, however, no
contemporary evidence that the king's health was failing. The apparent
claim in the Canterbury records that Edward's health was giving
grounds for anxiety in 1481-2 is an editorial interpolation. The
king's notorious self-indulgence was indeed beginning to take a
physical toll. Commines noted in 1475 that Edward (then aged
thirty-three) was running to fat and looked less handsome than he had
done five years previously, and the Crowland chronicler commented on
his corpulence in later years. But the chronicler, significantly,
coupled that comment with the assertion that there was (to the
surprise of the royal circle) nothing wrong with the king's memory for
detail. Certainly the king's final illness, which struck about
Eastertide 1483, seems to have taken the political community by
surprise.

The Crowland chronicle is noncommittal about the cause of Edward's
death, which was due neither to old age nor to any identifiable
disease that could not easily have been cured in a lesser man-perhaps
a guarded way of saying, as French chroniclers did openly, that
over-indulgence in food and drink had hastened the king's demise.
Mancini, by contrast, has a more circumstantial account of a chill
contracted while boating on the river. The onset of illness was
dramatic enough to give rise to reports that the king had died (which
perhaps endorses Commines's verdict of an apoplexy), but Edward then
lingered for about ten days, during which time he was able to add
codicils to his will and express his wishes for the future governance
of the kingdom. He died at the palace of Westminster on 9 April. After
lying in state in St Stephen's Chapel, his body was taken to St
George's Chapel, Windsor, where it was buried on 20 April in a chapel
built for the purpose in the king's own lifetime, although his
projected tomb of black marble, with a silver gilt effigy above a
figure of death (presumably a cadaver), was never completed.

Family affairs

Edward and Elizabeth Woodville had ten children: seven daughters and
three sons. The eldest, Elizabeth, was born in 1466 and remained
Edward's heir until the birth of Edward in 1470. She was later to
become the wife of Henry VII, but during her father's reign was
betrothed first to George, the son of John Neville, earl of
Northumberland, in 1470 as part of Edward's attempt to signal his
favour for Neville, and then to the dauphin. Her sisters were Mary
(1467-1482), Cecily (1469-1507), Margaret (who died shortly after her
birth in 1472), Anne (1475-1510), Katherine (1479-1527), and Bridget
(1480-1513). With the exception of Margaret and Bridget, all the
sisters featured in Edward's diplomacy. Mary, after initially being
held in reserve as a bride for the dauphin, was contracted to
Frederick of Denmark in 1481. Cecily was to marry the heir of
Scotland, and Anne was proposed as a bride for Philipp, the son of
Margaret of Burgundy and Maximilian. None of these plans had come to
anything at Edward's death, and Richard III, who undertook to find
suitable husbands for his nieces, preferred to look for Englishmen of
assured loyalty to himself. This was achieved only in the case of
Cecily, who married Ralph Scrope, the brother of Baron Scrope of
Masham. The marriage was annulled in 1486, to allow Cecily's marriage
to Henry VII's half-uncle John, Viscount Welles. After his death
Cecily married another Lincolnshire landowner, Thomas Kyme. But in
general Henry VII seems to have been in no hurry to find husbands for
his sisters-in-law, and it was not until 1495 that Anne and Katherine
were married, to Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, and William Courtenay,
earl of Devon, respectively. Bridget, who never married, became a nun
at Dartford.

The marriage of Edward IV's eldest son, Edward, was under discussion
from 1476, and by 1481 negotiations for his marriage to Anne of
Brittany were well advanced, although they had not been completed by
the time of Edward IV's death. The only son of Edward IV to marry was
Richard, born in 1473, who married the Mowbray heir, Anne, in January
1478. Anne died in 1481, but Richard retained her estates: an
arrangement that disinherited the two heirs general, John Howard and
William Berkeley. The third son of Edward IV was George, who was born
at Windsor in 1477 and died two years later.

Edward IV also had a number of extramarital relationships. According
to Mancini, these were extremely numerous and short-lived, although he
adds that the women were willing and Edward never resorted to force.
This view of Edward as an insatiable predator may be coloured, as are
some of Mancini's other claims, by a version of events deriving from
Gloucester and his circle, which were set out more formally in the act
of parliament of 1484 that asserted Richard's claim to the throne and
presented Edward's womanizing as a political grievance. This may in
turn have shaped the condemnation of Edward's behaviour that Sir
Thomas More was later to put in the mouth of the duke of Buckingham.
However, elsewhere in his history More offers a more detailed and less
hostile account. According to this, Edward claimed three mistresses:
the merriest, the wiliest, and the holiest in the realm. More only
identified one, the merriest, who was Jane (actually Elizabeth) Shore,
the daughter of the London mercer John Lambert and the divorced wife
of another mercer, William Shore, and he suggests that the others
chose to remain nameless because of their higher social standing.

Edward is known to have had two illegitimate children. One, Arthur
Plantagenet, married Elizabeth, the daughter of John Grey, Viscount
Lisle, in 1511 and was made Lord Lisle by Henry VIII in 1523. His
mother is unknown, although one tradition claims her as a member of
the Wayte family of Titchfield, Hampshire. Edward also had a daughter,
Grace, who is mentioned as present at the deathbed of Elizabeth
Woodville in 1492. Other families claimed royal bastards among their
number. Isabella, the wife of John, brother of James, Lord Audley (d.
1497), was reputedly Edward's illegitimate daughter, as was Elizabeth,
the wife of Sir Thomas Lumley, the son of George, Lord Lumley (d. 1507).

Reputation and significance

Evaluations of Edward and his reign have fluctuated considerably over
the years. Edward's contemporaries, at least among the political
elite, seem to have been impressed by him, and early Tudor writers
absorbed that tradition. Although no one was under any illusions about
his self-indulgence (and the Crowland chronicler was evidently both
relieved and surprised that he made an exemplary end), he was regarded
as an able and far-sighted ruler. Much of this admiration surely
derived from a perception that Edward had reasserted the authority of
royal government after the disasters of the previous reign. For those
who had experienced Henry VI's incompetence, and particularly the
descent into civil war in the late 1450s, the sense that there was an
effective king again must have been a considerable relief, and perhaps
encouraged a readiness to allow that the ends justified the means. A
similar view is apparent among Edward's more recent defenders, who
regard his occasional ruthlessness as a necessary evil in the
establishment of a 'new monarchy' (a concept first propounded by J. R.
Green in 1878) which was a considerable improvement upon the old. An
extension of this view sees Edward IV as a prototype Renaissance
prince, whose appetites and cruelty matched those of his grandson
Henry VIII (who seems indeed to have resembled him physically).

This interpretation can shade into a much more hostile reading,
derived ultimately from the French chroniclers, which sees Edward as
debauched, vicious, greedy, and lazy, stirred to action only by a
crisis. The difference between proponents of the two views is less the
degree to which Edward's perceived vices are stressed, than an
unwillingness on the part of Edward's critics to offset those vices
with statesmanship. William Stubbs, who thought that Edward's regime
marked a retrograde step after Lancastrian parliamentary monarchy,
clearly felt that the needs of government were subordinated to, rather
than served by, Edward's cruelty and 'conspicuous talent for
extortion'; a subordination made explicit in his comment that Edward
enforced the law but only when that was compatible with 'the fortunes
of his favourites or his own likes and dislikes' (Stubbs, 3.226). For
later historians, by contrast, 'the ruthlessness of a Renaissance
despot' becomes a desirable attribute when coupled with 'the
strong-willed ability of a statesman' (Ross, 419).

Seeing Edward as a 'new' or proto-Renaissance monarch is, however, a
false perspective. Edward's reign presents, and was no doubt intended
to present, a contrast to the disastrous regime of Henry VI, but what
Edward was doing was restoring the norms of medieval monarchy after
their eclipse, not taking the opportunity to devise a new model of
kingship. In a personal monarchy the character and aptitude of the
individual king will necessarily colour his reign, but nothing in
Edward's style of government constituted a break with accepted
practice. Like any medieval king Edward essentially exercised his
power through other people, and his readiness to enhance (or even
create) and then employ the authority of trusted associates needs to
be seen in that context. This meant that a good deal of government
activity, for instance Edward's apparent concern to enforce his rights
over such things as wardships and marriages, had to remain a matter of
ad hoc negotiation, in which the king was inevitably involved. As a
result, and in spite of his willingness to delegate local authority,
Edward's own input remained essential. His achievements were thus
vulnerable when he died, and would have been equally vulnerable had he
simply lost his grip or his energies as he grew older.

Some writers have gone further, and argued that the Yorkist power base
created by Edward was not only fragile but fundamentally flawed.
According to this interpretation, developed most fully by C. D. Ross,
Edward's willingness to promote his family and friends caused deep
factional divisions within the Yorkist polity, particularly between
the Woodvilles and others, so that the polity split along these fault
lines as soon as Edward's hand was removed. It was thus Edward
himself, on this reading, who was responsible for the dynastic
collapse that so quickly followed his death, and his reign must be
judged in the light of his failure to secure the accession of his heir.

While it is true that Edward's death did give rise to anxieties about
the likely role of the Woodvilles, it is difficult to accept that
hostility to the family was so profound that the deposition of Edward
V was seen as preferable to allowing them influence-or even that
political dislocation short of deposition was inevitable. In the
immediate aftermath of Edward's death the political community seems,
on the contrary, to have been anxious to preserve the status quo. It
was the intervention of Edward's brother Gloucester that transformed
the situation, and Edward IV can hardly be blamed for not foreseeing
the dramatic deposition of a child king by his appointed protector.
Significantly, an informed observer like the Crowland chronicler,
although aware of Edward's failings (and of what was to happen after
his death), was still prepared to describe the king's provisions for
the future as wise.

Personality and achievement

Edward IV was a successful warrior, whose victories in 1461 and 1471
were quite literally vital to his success. His repeated determination
to seize the initiative, to move quickly and confront his enemies in
the hope of taking them at a disadvantage, along with his readiness to
take a lead on the battlefield itself, probably did as much as any
tactical skills he may have possessed to enable him first to take the
throne and later to recover it. Nevertheless, if Edward IV could be
summed up in a single phrase, it would probably be that he was someone
who liked to have all comfortable about him. His command to the
sheriff of Devon in 1473 that 'ye sit still and be quiet' (Morgan,
17) could almost be the reign's leitmotif. At times this manifested
itself as a preference for doing nothing. The Pastons' troubles over
the Fastolf inheritance have been seen as an example of Edward's
tendency to shrug his shoulders and let events take their course. His
preferred mode of kingship was probably the careless affability he
showed to overawed visitors to his court. But Edward's very
accessibility is evidence that he knew how to say no. Although
good-natured it is never suggested that he was gullible, and
significantly 'counsel' is very rarely an issue in his reign. Apart
from the criticism levelled by Warwick and Clarence at the circle
around the king in 1469-which does not seem to have commanded general
acceptance-no contemporaries made political capital out of accusations
that Edward had favourites. The almost universal respect shown towards
Edward's closest friend, William, Lord Hastings, is as much a tribute
to Edward's acumen as to Hastings's.

The king was his own master and did not hesitate to show it as
necessary. When John (I) Paston ignored the king's commands Edward
reportedly erupted: 'he made a gret a-vowe that if ye come not at the
third commandement ye xulde dye therefore', although,
characteristically, Edward added that he was not convinced by the
accusation brought against Paston (Davis, 1.201). Such displays of
temper should not be seen as empty words. Contemporaries testify to
Edward's personal authority. One of his servants reportedly withdrew
from court when Edward refused to recognize him in public, and retired
to a nearby manor to await the king's orders. Consciousness of his
power, coupled with the desire for things to be arranged for his own
convenience, could make Edward overbearing and insensitive, as in his
treatment of John Neville. His territorial reorderings of 1473-4 could
be seen in the same light.

Comfort is not only a political concept. Edward liked luxury and was a
great builder, most notably at Windsor, Greenwich, and Eltham. His
projects were expensive, and contemporaries were under no illusions
about Edward's desire to amass wealth (to an extent that some
considered unbecoming in a king). Foreign commentators generally
assumed that this meant a concomitant unwillingness to spend, and
certainly Edward seems to have been eager to secure diplomatic
marriages for his children at minimum cost to himself. But this should
perhaps be seen, at least in part, as one facet of the marked
hostility to the export of bullion which characterizes royal policy in
this period. There is no suggestion that Edward was a miser in the
usual sense of the word. On the contrary, he liked spending on himself
and on his surroundings, and was well aware of the political
significance of being seen in splendour. The absence of chamber
accounts makes it difficult to reconstruct his environment in detail,
but it can be glimpsed in the Crowland chronicler's description of
Edward amid the splendour of his court at Christmas 1482. The latest
fashions 'displayed the prince (who always stood out because of his
elegant figure) like a new and incomparable spectacle set before the
onlookers'. It was a royal court 'such as befitted a mighty kingdom'
(Pronay and Cox, 149).

Rosemary Horrox

Sources Chancery records + RotP, vols. 5-6 + GEC, Peerage + N. Pronay
and J. Cox, eds., The Crowland chronicle continuations, 1459-1486
(1986) + The usurpation of Richard the third: Dominicus Mancinus ad
Angelum Catonem de occupatione regni Anglie per Ricardum tercium
libellus, ed. and trans. C. A. J. Armstrong, 2nd edn (1969) [Lat.
orig., 1483, with parallel Eng. trans.] + N. Davis, ed., Paston
letters and papers of the fifteenth century, 2 vols. (1971-6) + C.
Ross, Edward IV (1974) + C. L. Scofield, The life and reign of Edward
the Fourth, 2 vols. (1923) + R. Horrox, Richard III, a study of
service, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 11
(1989) + P. A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 1411-1460 (1988) + J. R.
Lander, Crown and nobility, 1450-1509 (1976) + A. J. Pollard, ed., The
Wars of the Roses (1995) + D. A. L. Morgan, 'The king's affinity in
the polity of Yorkist England', TRHS, 5th ser., 23 (1973), 1-25 + A.
Luders and others, eds., Statutes of the realm, 11 vols. in 12, RC
(1810-28), vol. 2 + Memoirs of Phillipe de Commynes: the reign of
Louis XI, 1461-83, trans. M. Jones, pbk edn (1972) + St Thomas More,
The history of King Richard III, ed. R. S. Sylvester (1963), vol. 2 of
The Yale edition of the complete works of St Thomas More + A. H.
Thomas and I. D. Thornley, eds., The great chronicle of London (1938)
+ Recueil des croniques ... par Jehan de Waurin, ed. W. Hardy and E.
L. C. P. Hardy, 5 vols., Rolls Series, 39 (1864-91) + J. Warkworth, A
chronicle of the first thirteen years of the reign of King Edward the
Fourth, ed. J. O. Halliwell, CS, old ser., 10 (1839); repr. in Three
chronicles of the reign of Edward IV (1988) + J. Bruce, ed., Historie
of the arrivall of Edward IV in England, and the finall recoverye of
his kingdomes from Henry VI, CS, 1 (1838); repr. in Three chronicles
of the reign of Edward IV (1988) + P. Vergil, Polydore Vergil's
'English history', ed. H. Ellis, CS, 36 (1846) + W. Stubbs, The
constitutional history of England in its origin and development, new
edn, 3 vols. (1906) + J. R. Green, A short history of the English
people (1888) + P. M. Kendall, Richard the third (1955) + R. A.
Griffiths, 'Wales and the marches', Fifteenth-century England,
1399-1509, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross, and R. A. Griffiths (1972),
145-72
Archives TNA: PRO
Likenesses W. Neve, stained-glass window, c.1482, Canterbury
Cathedral · oils, second version, 16th cent., NPG · P. Vanderbank,
line engraving, pubd 1706 (after a portrait), BM, NPG · line engraving
(after his great seal), BM; repro. in F. Sandford, Genealogical
history of the kings of England (1677) · manuscript il<br/><br/>(Message over 64 KB, truncated)