King Edward IV

Edward IV, having secured the throne, now sought to enjoy the fruits of his usurpation. In this he was hindered first and foremost by the disloyalty of his own family, and in particular of his younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, rewarded in Edward’s first reign with a vast estate and provision for a household of 399 staff, grander even than that of the royal household, yet lured into rebellion against his brother by the prospect of marriage to a daughter of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.

In 1471, Clarence had in theory made his peace with the King, but his treason was never truly forgiven. As early as 1472, a dispute with the youngest of his three brothers, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, over the partition of the Neville estates, in which Richard was almost certainly the aggressor but in which Edward IV backed Richard against Clarence, swiftly degenerated into an open rift amidst accusations of abuse of power by all concerned. By 1477, not only had Clarence been implicated in the kidnapping and judicial murder of a maidservant, and accused of poisoning his wife, who had in fact died from the effects of childbirth, but also in charges of imagining the King’s death by necromancy brought against Clarence’s retainer, Thomas Burdet. Convicted for his involvement in these and other affairs, after a show trial that would have done credit to the henchmen of Josef Stalin, Clarence was executed in the Tower of London, apparently by drowning in a barrel of sweet Greek (or malmsey) wine. With fine hypocrisy, Edward IV paid for lavish funeral celebrations and a tomb at Tewkesbury Abbey. Where it had taken the Lancastrian dynasty nearly fifty years to collapse into rancour and self-interest, the house of York almost immediately fell to fighting within itself. These were men and women who simply did not behave as kings and queens were expected to behave.