Richard III by Desmond Seward

dangerous enemies. A contemporary chronicler describes the marriage of the aged Duchess of Norfolk as ‘diabolical’. Moreover, the old lady was a Nevill by birth and Warwick’s aunt. The Earl was also angered by Thomas Grey’s marriage, since the Duke of Exeter’s daughter had been betrothed to his nephew. The boy Duke of Buckingham hated his Woodville bride and never forgave her or her family – one day Queen Elizabeth would have to pay a dreadful reckoning to her unwilling brother-in-law.
    If Edward IV’s rashness in marrying her may be attributed to the lust of an exceptionally self-indulgent man, it is none the less difficult to understand why he apparently did not realize that he had mortally offended Warwick. He made no effort to placate the Earl. Perhaps his resentment of Warwick’s domination had reached the point where he could no longer control it. By his marriage he had humiliated him, especially abroad and in particular in France. It demonstrated all too clearly that the Earl was not all powerful in England, as he pretended, and that he certainly did not enjoy the full confidence of the King.
    Furious though Warwick must have been at the advancement of such upstarts as the Woodvilles, he was far more angry at the implications for his foreign policy. It seems that he had been ensnared by the spidery wiles of Louis XI of France, who addressed him flatteringly as ‘cousin’ in his letters and who promised rich rewards for his help. At the end of 1465 the Earl was still pretending to Louis that he was in complete control of English foreign policy and promising that Edward would not support the French king’s rebellious brother. In June the following year he sailed from his stronghold at Calais up the Seine to meet Louis, who enchanted him by his attentions and expensive presents.
    However, in July 1468 Edward’s sister Margaret married Charles of Charolais, the eldest son of Philip, Duke of Burgundy. This was the one match which Louis XI was most anxious to prevent, since he dreaded a revival of the Anglo-Burgundian axis, which had once ruled half of France and all but destroyed the Valois monarchy. In any case Charolais and Warwick had disliked each other on sight on the only occasion when they met. The Croyland chronicler, a contemporary and a professional diplomatist, believed that the marriage of Margaret of York rather than the King’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville wasthe real reason for the conflict which now broke out between Warwick and Edward IV. Soon England was allying with Burgundy and Brittany against Louis XI, and Parliament voted a substantial sum for an invasion of France. The frantic Louis stepped up his efforts to set Warwick against Edward, even offering him a principality to be created out of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland.
    As he was still only a boy, Richard could not hope to have much influence on events. Nevertheless, he was at court and sometimes an obviously angry spectator. Mancini heard that, like Clarence, he had been very displeased by the Woodville marriage, but that, unlike his brother, he tried to conceal his resentment. He accompanied the court to Greenwich – now a manor of the Queen – so presumably he was at her Coronation, even if he does not seem to have been made to play a prominent part in that distasteful ceremony. He cannot have relished watching his mother and sisters kneel in front of Elizabeth Woodville, according to the etiquette of the period, when she ate in public. There was further irritating pomp at the birth of the Queen’s first child by Edward in February 1466, a daughter who was named Elizabeth like her mother.
    Warwick had lost the King, but he still hoped to control the two Princes of the Blood. In the autumn of 1464, after Edward’s announcement of his marriage, he had lured them to Cambridge where he suggested that Clarence should marry his elder daughter and become heir to half his vast possessions. It is likely that he offered the