His younger brother was more secure than ever. Richard of Gloucester remained the paramount lord of northern England. The Percy family were supreme in Northumberland, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, but the rest of the north came under the direct control of Gloucester. Edward had no reason to doubt his loyalty, however, and he seemed by far the best choice to be named ‘Protector’ of England and of the king’s eldest son.
The moment came sooner than expected. In the spring of 1483 Edward IV became mysteriously and dangerously ill. It is reported that he caught cold on a fishing trip. Commynes says that he died of ‘quaterre’ or apoplexy. The Crowland Chronicle states that he lay down ‘neither worn out with old age nor yet seized with any known kind of malady’. There is a suggestion of death by poison. In truth the only malady may have been that of self-indulgence; he ate and drank copious amounts; he had grown fat and debauched. Only a very pious king could avoid such a fate. Edward IV expired in his fortieth year.
Edward died without debts, the first king to remain solvent for 200 years. It was, perhaps, his greatest achievement. He had made no great legislative or judicial advantages, but he had at least consolidated the role and power of royal government. He had learned to make it work after the intermittently weak reign of Henry VI. That was the sum of it. The fact that England emerged from his reign more prosperous than before has everything to do with the underlying strength and purposefulness of a growing nation.
Edward was not strong enough, in any case, to ensure that his eldest son would be safely crowned as his successor. The warden of Tattershall College in Lincolnshire wrote to the bishop of Winchester that ‘for now our sovereign lord the king is dead, whose soul Jesu take to his great mercy, we know not who shall be our lord nor shall have the rule about us’. Yet the transition appeared to have been immediate and graceful. Edward, prince of Wales, was acclaimed as Edward V.
The young heir apparent was at Ludlow, near the border of Wales, at the time of his father’s death; he was in the company of his uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, when he was summoned back to London by his mother. A council had been called in the capital, of which the principal member was Lord Hastings. Hastings, like Gloucester, was loyal to the Yorkist monarchy rather than to the Woodville family; when he learned that the queen had asked her brother to guard her son’s return to London with as large a force as he could assemble, he sensed the possibility of an unwelcome show of strength. He threatened to retire to Calais if the Woodvilles attempted to overawe the city, and at the same time he wrote to Gloucester with the troubling news.
Elizabeth Woodville then agreed to a compromise in which the young king would have an escort of no more than 2,000 men. Gloucester had been alerted to the possibility that the Woodvilles would control the king in more than name, however, and that they would supplant his role as the rightful Protector of the realm. He marched from his northern lands and joined his supporter, the duke of Buckingham, in Northampton at the end of April. This was just ten miles north of the place where the royal party had halted on their march to London; Stony Stratford was at the junction of Watling Street and the Northampton Road.
The two sides hailed each other with expressions of friendship. Rivers and his companions greeted the two dukes and entertained them at a house close to Northampton itself; they spent a convivial evening, but on the following morning Rivers was arrested and on charges of treason sent to a northern prison. Gloucester and Buckingham then rode out to Stony Stratford, and informed the young king that his uncle and others of his affinity had been engaged in a deep conspiracy against him. Edward objected, and protested that ‘he had seen nothing evil in them and wished to keep them unless otherwise proved to be evil’. But the force of a fourteen-year-old will was no match for that of Gloucester. Gloucester also informed the king that Rivers had played some part in the dead king’s debaucheries, thus fatally weakening him; this was in keeping with the strong moralism of his character. The young king remarked that he had full confidence in his mother, to which Buckingham replied that he should put no faith in women.
