He soon deployed that strength against his own brother. Clarence had effectively become ungovernable. According to the Crowland Chronicle, the most reliable source of information for the period, he ‘now seemed more and more to be withdrawing from the king’s presence, hardly uttering a word in council, not eating and drinking in the king’s residence’. He had some cause for disaffection. On the death of his wife, after childbirth, it was suggested that he should marry the daughter of Charles of Burgundy; Edward refused to countenance such a union, because with the support of Burgundy, Clarence would become too powerful. For similar reasons Edward would not permit Clarence to marry the sister of the king of Scotland.
In April 1477 Clarence accused one of his wife’s attendants, Ankarette Twynyho, of having murdered her mistress with ‘a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison’; an armed gang of his men seized the unfortunate woman and took her to Clarence’s town of Warwick where she was hanged. It was a form of judicial murder. Three months later one of the squires of his household was charged with necromancy in pursuit of the king’s death and, on being pronounced guilty, was drawn to the gallows at Tyburn. On the following day Clarence came to the royal council and caused to be read a proclamation of the man’s innocence; Clarence then withdrew. He had effectively challenged the king’s honesty as well as his system of justice. Edward therefore summoned Clarence to appear before him and, in the presence of the mayor and aldermen of London, declared that he had acted ‘as if he were in contempt of the law of the land and a great threat to the judges and jurors of the kingdom’.
At the beginning of 1478 a session of the parliament house was summoned where, in front of the lords, the king accused his brother of various crimes against the throne; some witnesses were called, but it was clear that they had been instructed in advance. The duke defended himself as best he could, even pledging to endure trial by combat, but the assembled lords declared him to be guilty of treason. The lords of the parliament were no doubt bound to support the king’s wishes in the matter, and did not need to be duped into delivering their verdict. Yet the evidence was weak and perhaps concocted. Clarence was taken to the Tower where, a few days later, he was murdered by surreptitious means. It has often been stated that he was drowned in a butt of malmsey wine; this curious detail may, oddly enough, reflect its accuracy. It might indicate, however, that he was drowned in his bath; bathtubs were often made out of sawn-down wine barrels.
The king had killed the elder of his two brothers by dubious means. It was an act of ruthlessness that sealed the supremacy of the king. A soothsayer had prophesied that the reign of Edward would be followed by one whose name began with ‘G’. So George, duke of Clarence, was despatched. The name of the younger brother, Gloucester, obviously did not occur to him. It was said at the time that the queen, and her Woodville relations, had also been eager to destroy Clarence; his eloquence and fair looks posed a challenge to her young sons in the event of Edward’s death. Rumour was piled upon rumour; the murderous court was filled with shadows and suspicions. The path to glory for Edward IV had once been carved through the corpses of his enemies; now it mounted over the body of his brother. The king, according to the Crowland Chronicle, ‘performed the duties of his office with such a high hand, that he appeared to be dreaded by all his subjects, while he himself stood in fear of no one’.
Apart from consolidating his rule, and maintaining his royal profits, Edward spent a great deal of time in arranging as many advantageous marriages as possible for his immediate kin. His investments in wool and cloth, as a working merchant, were small in comparison with the investment in his family. In all he had three sons and seven daughters; two of them died in infancy, leaving two sons and six daughters. The merry-go-round began, with daughters being betrothed to the heirs of Scotland, France and Burgundy. The prince of Wales, Edward, was played as a bargaining chip with Brittany. The king wanted hard money in exchange; he did not wish to pay the dowries for his daughters, in particular, and so engaged in prolonged negotiation to avoid that necessity. In fact none of his children were married by the time of his death, for the principal reason that they were still too young. All his plans, intentions and schemes came to nothing. The thousands of words spent in speeches and diplomacy vanished into the air.
