he returned to the Court in February 1477 it was to face a new crisis in foreign policy – and the last act in the pitiful career of George, Duke of Clarence. The crisis arose from the death in the battle of Nancy of Charles, Duke of Burgundy, at the hands of Swiss pikemen, on 1 January 1477. With him were slaughtered the remains of the Burgundian army which had already sustained a crushing defeat at the battle of Morat six months previously. King Louis, wrote Commynes, ‘was so overjoyed he scarcely knew how to react’. This was an overstatement. Since Charles left no male heir, Louis immediately claimed that the duchy of Burgundy, along with the northern counties of Artois, Picardy and Flanders reverted to the French Crown. His opponents were Charles’s twenty-year-old daughter Mary, and her childless step-mother, Margaret of York.
Margaret naturally turned to her brother Edward for help. But Edward could not make up his mind. There was a strong case for propping up the shaky Burgundian régime which had, in the past, provided a useful check to Louis’s more extravagant ambitions. Should the Burgundian possessions in Flanders fall to the French Crown, England’s Continental foothold at Calais would be entirely surrounded by Louis’s domains. But if Edward declared openly in favour of Charles’s heiress, he would have to forego his French pension and disburse the considerable treasure he had amassed since 1475 on an expeditionary force. In the end he made a few ineffectual protests and did nothing. Despairing of Edward’s help, Mary’s advisers scoured the Courts of Europe for a rich and war-like husband to come to her rescue. An atmosphere of gloomy foreboding dominated the English Court. ‘It seemeth that the world is all quavering’, wrote John Paston, ‘It will reboil somewhere, so that I deem young men shall be cherished.’
The young man the Dowager Duchess Margaret cherished was George, Duke of Clarence. Here was a golden chance to bestow on her favourite brother, whose wife had just died in childbirth, the hand of the greatest heiress in Europe. However, it was hardly surprising, as the Croyland Chronicler put it, that:
...so great a contemplated exaltation of his ungrateful brother displeased the King. He consequently threw all possible impediments in the way, in order that the match before-mentioned might not be carried into effect, and exerted all his influence that the heiress might be given in marriage to Maximilian [of Austria], the son of the [Holy Roman] Emperor; which was afterwards effected. The indignation of the Duke was probably still further increased by this; and now each began to look upon the other with no very fraternal eyes. You might then have seen (as such men are generally to be found in the courts of all princes), flatterers running to and fro, from the one side to the other, and carrying backwards and forwards the words which had fallen from the two brothers, even if they had happened to be spoken in the most secret closet.
Clarence’s paranoid feelings were further inflamed by the news that Edward had proposed as his candidate for Mary’s husband a member of the despised Woodville clan, the Queen’s brother Anthony, Earl Rivers. This time Edward was not prepared to turn a deaf ear to his brother’s threats of treason and revenge. After a final warning Clarence was to be struck down. The warning took the form of a death sentence on one of the Duke’s retainers, one Thomas Burdett, who was condemned on charges of treasonable writing and necromancy. Ignoring the danger signal Clarence interrupted a Council meeting at Westminster to protest Burdett’s innocence. Even more recklessly he began to spread the old story that Edward was a bastard, armed his retainers and managed to engineer riots in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In the meantime, King Louis, ever anxious to keep his English cousins at each other’s throats while he completed the dismemberment of Burgundy,
Margaret naturally turned to her brother Edward for help. But Edward could not make up his mind. There was a strong case for propping up the shaky Burgundian régime which had, in the past, provided a useful check to Louis’s more extravagant ambitions. Should the Burgundian possessions in Flanders fall to the French Crown, England’s Continental foothold at Calais would be entirely surrounded by Louis’s domains. But if Edward declared openly in favour of Charles’s heiress, he would have to forego his French pension and disburse the considerable treasure he had amassed since 1475 on an expeditionary force. In the end he made a few ineffectual protests and did nothing. Despairing of Edward’s help, Mary’s advisers scoured the Courts of Europe for a rich and war-like husband to come to her rescue. An atmosphere of gloomy foreboding dominated the English Court. ‘It seemeth that the world is all quavering’, wrote John Paston, ‘It will reboil somewhere, so that I deem young men shall be cherished.’
The young man the Dowager Duchess Margaret cherished was George, Duke of Clarence. Here was a golden chance to bestow on her favourite brother, whose wife had just died in childbirth, the hand of the greatest heiress in Europe. However, it was hardly surprising, as the Croyland Chronicler put it, that:
...so great a contemplated exaltation of his ungrateful brother displeased the King. He consequently threw all possible impediments in the way, in order that the match before-mentioned might not be carried into effect, and exerted all his influence that the heiress might be given in marriage to Maximilian [of Austria], the son of the [Holy Roman] Emperor; which was afterwards effected. The indignation of the Duke was probably still further increased by this; and now each began to look upon the other with no very fraternal eyes. You might then have seen (as such men are generally to be found in the courts of all princes), flatterers running to and fro, from the one side to the other, and carrying backwards and forwards the words which had fallen from the two brothers, even if they had happened to be spoken in the most secret closet.
Clarence’s paranoid feelings were further inflamed by the news that Edward had proposed as his candidate for Mary’s husband a member of the despised Woodville clan, the Queen’s brother Anthony, Earl Rivers. This time Edward was not prepared to turn a deaf ear to his brother’s threats of treason and revenge. After a final warning Clarence was to be struck down. The warning took the form of a death sentence on one of the Duke’s retainers, one Thomas Burdett, who was condemned on charges of treasonable writing and necromancy. Ignoring the danger signal Clarence interrupted a Council meeting at Westminster to protest Burdett’s innocence. Even more recklessly he began to spread the old story that Edward was a bastard, armed his retainers and managed to engineer riots in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. In the meantime, King Louis, ever anxious to keep his English cousins at each other’s throats while he completed the dismemberment of Burgundy,
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