Brittany

Anne, Duchess of Brittany (25 January 1477 – 9 January 1514), also known as Anna of Brittany (French: Anne de Bretagne; Breton: Anna Vreizh), was a Breton ruler, who was to become queen to two successive French kings. She was born in Nantes, Brittany, and was the daughter of Francis II, Duke of Brittany and Margaret of Foix. Her maternal grandparents were Queen Eleanor of Navarre and Gaston IV, Count of Foix. Upon her father's death, she became sovereign Duchess of Brittany, Countess of Nantes, Montfort and Richmont and Viscountess of Limoges. In her time, she was the richest European woman.

Brittany being an attractive prize, Anne had no shortage of suitors. She was officially promised in marriage to Edward, Prince of Wales, son of Edward IV of England in 1483; however, the boy disappeared, and was presumed dead, soon after the death of Edward IV.

As a potential ally with naval resources, and, after 1471, as the place of exile for Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, the last royal claimant of the house of LANCASTER, the French Duchy of Brittany played an important role in the WARS OF THE ROSES.

Although FRANCIS II, duke of Brittany from 1458 to 1488, held his title of the king of FRANCE, the duchy in the fifteenth century was an independent state, with its own administrative and ecclesiastical structure and its own legislative and judicial bodies. Breton dukes had achieved political autonomy by playing off the French against the English during the HUNDRED YEARS WAR. Breton independence served English interests, for a French Brittany threatened English security. Lying across the Channel from England, the Breton peninsula had a long coastline, and the duchy was strong in ships and experienced seamen; in French hands, Brittany was a potential base for invading England. Alternatively, England could employ an autonomous Brittany to trouble France in the same way France encouraged SCOTLAND to threaten England, while the Breton fleet was a useful addition to any anti-French alliance.

To maintain Breton independence from France, Francis sought to establish close relations with England and BURGUNDY without unnecessarily alienating the French. Thus, in the early 1460s, Francis, following his own inclinations and the lead of LOUIS XI, provided assistance to Lancastrian exiles within his borders, such as Jasper TUDOR, earl of Pembroke. However, in 1465, Francis took Brittany into the League of the Public Weal, a coalition of French princes led by CHARLES of Burgundy that forced Louis to concede privileges and territories. By 1468, growing threats of French invasion and a thriving trade with England persuaded Francis to conclude formal treaties of commerce and alliance with EDWARD IV. In 1471, Channel storms drove Pembroke and his nephew Richmond, the last Lancastrian claimant of consequence, onto the Breton coast. This literal windfall provided Francis with the means for pressuring Edward IV, now secure on his throne, into maintaining English support for Brittany.

In 1472, Edward sent English ARCHERS under Anthony WOODVILLE, Earl Rivers, to help the Bretons repel a French invasion; in 1480, Edward betrothed his son, to Francis’s only child, Anne. In 1483, after RICHARD III destabilized English politics by usurping his nephew’s throne, Richmond, who was kept in increasingly rigorous confinement, became a serious threat to the house of YORK. Because Richard was too insecure to materially assist Brittany, Francis provided Richmond with men and ships and allowed him to join BUCKINGHAM’S REBELLION in October 1483. After the failure of that uprising, a band of English exiles formed around Richmond in Brittany, and the pro-English faction at the Breton court, led by Pierre LANDAIS, the treasurer, used the duke’s illness to secretly negotiate with Richard for Richmond’s surrender. Warned of the plot by Bishop John MORTON, Richmond and his followers fled into France, from where they launched a successful invasion of England in 1485.

Francis II died in 1488 in the midst of a French invasion that only ended in 1491 with the conclusion of a marriage treaty between Duchess Anne and CHARLES VIII. Because the settlement laid out terms for Brittany’s incorporation into France, Henry VII led an English army to Anne’s assistance in 1492. However, the invasion ended in the Treaty of Etaples, whereby Henry acquiesced in the takeover of Brittany in return for a French pension and an agreement to expel Perkin WARBECK and other Yorkist pretenders from France. Although the Breton Estates (a legislative assembly) did not formally vote for perpetual union with France until 1532, the duchy was effectively under French control after 1491.

Further Reading: Davies,C. S. L.,“The Wars of the Roses in European Context” in A. J. Pollard, ed., The Wars of the Roses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 162–185; Galliou, Patrick, and Michael Jones, The Bretons (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Jones, Michael, The Creation of Brittany:A Late Medieval State (London: Hambledon, 1988).

Elizabeth (Jane) Shore, (d. 1527)

Through sexual liaisons with EDWARD IV and several prominent courtiers, Elizabeth Shore, better known as Jane Shore, became entangled in the political intrigues that led to the usurpation of RICHARD III and the revival of civil war in the 1480s.

One of Edward IV’s many mistresses, Shore was, according to Sir Thomas More’s HISTORY OF KING RICHARD III, the king’s favorite— less for her beauty than for her engaging personality. “Proper she was and fair. . . . Yet delighted not men so much in her beauty, as in her pleasant behaviour. For a proper wit had she, and could both read well and write, merry of company, ready and quick of answer, neither mute nor full of babble, sometimes taunting without displeasure and not without disport” (Ross, Richard III, p. 137).

The daughter of a LONDON merchant and the wife of William Shore, a London goldsmith, Jane Shore may have become the king’s mistress in about 1470. Although Edward never allowed his lovers to become political figures, Shore, again according to More, exercised a benign influence over the king, tending to mollify him when he was angry or displeased with anyone.

Upon Edward’s death in April 1483, Shore may have become the lover of Thomas GREY, marquis of Dorset, and then of his rival, William HASTINGS, Lord Hastings. If this second relationship occurred, it may have involved her in politics, for on 13 June 1483, at a council meeting in the TOWER OF LONDON, Richard, duke of Gloucester, charged Shore and Queen Elizabeth WOODVILLE with trying, on Hastings’s urging, to destroy him through sorcery. The accusation led to Hastings’s summary execution and to Shore’s arrest. Forced soon after to do public penance as a harlot by walking through London dressed only in her kirtle (underskirt or gown) and carrying a lighted taper, Shore was afterward imprisoned in Ludgate. Although it is possible that Shore participated, perhaps as a go-between, in anti-Gloucester plots involving either Hastings or Dorset, her active cooperation with her late lover’s wife in sorcery is most unlikely. Both contemporary writers, like More and Polydore Vergil in his ANGLICA HISTORIA, and many modern historians believe that Gloucester’s charges were largely invented to destroy Hastings, who was loyal to EDWARDV and thus a serious obstacle to the duke’s plan to take the throne.

While in prison, Shore charmed the king’s solicitor, Thomas Lynom, who sought permission to marry her, Shore’s husband having presumably died. Richard III (the former duke of Gloucester) told his chancellor, John RUSSELL, bishop of Lincoln, to dissuade Lynom from such a foolish action, but he gave permission for the match should the solicitor be adamant. Whether or not the marriage occurred is unclear, for beside the fact that she was still living in London in poverty in Henry VIII’s reign, almost nothing is known of Shore’s life after 1484.

Further Reading: Ross, Charles, Edward IV (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1998); Ross, Charles, Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Seward, Desmond, The Wars of the Roses (New York:Viking, 1995).

HOUSE OF YORK: EDWARD IV, MERCHANT KING 1461-70, 1471-83

The flamboyant Edward IV shares with his luckless rival Henry VI the dubious distinction of being the only king of England to reign twice. In 1461 and 1471, thanks to Warwick the Kingmaker, the two men played box and cox in what turned out to be a humiliating royal timeshare. But after Edward had defeated Warwick and disposed of Henry, he ruled for a dozen prosperous and largely undisturbed years, during which he achieved another distinction. He was the first king for more than a century and a half who did not die in debt — in fact, he actually left his successor a little money in the kitty.

Edward was England’s first and last businessman monarch. Clapping folk around the shoulders and cracking dirty jokes, he was also an unashamed wheeler-dealer. He set up his own trading business, making handsome profits on exporting wool and tin to Italy, while importing Mediterranean cargoes like wine, paper, sugar and oranges. He ran the Crown lands with the keen eye of a bailiff, and when it came to PR with the merchant community he was a master of corporate hospitality.

One day in 1482 Edward invited the Lord Mayor of London, the aldermen and ‘a certain number of such head commoners as the mayor would assign’ to join him in the royal forest at Waltham in Essex. There, in today’s golf-course country, they were treated to a morning of sport, then conveyed ‘to a strong and pleasant lodge made of green boughs and other pleasant things. Within which lodge were laid certain tables, whereat at once the said mayor and his company were set and served right plenteously with all manner of dainties… and especially of venison, both of red deer and of fallow.’ After lunch the King took his guests hunting again, and a few days later sent their wives ‘two harts and six bucks with a tun of Gascon Wine’.

It could be said that Edward IV invented the seductive flummery of the modern honours list when he made six London aldermen Knights of the Bath. Like the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Bath, which referred to the ritual cleansing that a squire underwent when he became a knight, was primarily a military honour. Now the King extended the bait to rich civilians that he wanted to keep on side: a moneylender would kneel down as Bill Bloggs, the sword would touch his shoulder, and he arose Sir William.

Edward understood that everyone had his price — himself included. In 1475 he had taken an army across the Channel where he met up with the French King at Picquigny near Amiens — and promptly did a deal to take his army home again. For a down payment of 75,000 crowns and a pension of 50,000 a year, he cheerfully sold off his birthright — England’s claim to the French territories for which so many of his ancestors had fought so bloodily over the years.

The Treaty of Picquigny brought peace and prosperity to England, but not much honour. Edward’s reign was too undramatic for Shakespeare to write a play about — one reason, perhaps, why Edward is sometimes called England’s ‘forgotten king’. But the beautiful St George’s Chapel at Windsor, designed to outshine the chapel that his rival Henry VI had built at Eton College in the valley below, remains his memorial. And the Royal Book reveals a sumptuous court — along with a diverting little insight into how comfortably this fleshly monarch lived. After he had risen every morning, a yeoman was deputed to leap on to his bed and roll up and down so as to level out the lumps in the litter of bracken and straw that made up the royal mattress.

In 1483, Edward IV retired to his mattress unexpectedly, having caught a chill while fishing. He died some days later, aged only forty. Had this cynical yet able man lived just a few years longer, his elder son Edward, only twelve at the time of his death, might have been able to build on his legacy. As it was, young Edward and his younger brother soon found themselves inside the Tower of London, courtesy of their considerate uncle Richard.

WILLIAM CAXTON 1474

Caxton showing the first specimen of his printing to King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth at the Almonry, Westminster.

Wars and Roses… we have seen that roses were rare on the battle banners of fifteenth-century England. Let’s now take a closer look at the ‘wars’ themselves. In the thirty-two years that history textbooks conventionally allot to the ‘Wars of the Roses’, there were long periods of peace. In fact, there were only thirteen weeks of actual fighting — and though the battles themselves were bitter and sometimes very bloody, mayhem and ravaging seldom ensued.

’It is a custom in England,’ reported Philippe de Commynes, a shrewd French visitor to England in the 1470s, ‘that the victors in battle kill nobody, especially none of the ordinary soldiers’. In this curiously warless warfare, defeated noblemen could expect prompt and ruthless execution, but ‘neither the country nor the people, nor the houses were wasted, destroyed or demolished’. The rank and file returned home as soon as they could, to continue farming their land.

In towns and cities people also got on with their lives. Trade and business positively flourished, generating contracts, ledgers and letters that called for a literate workforce — and it was the ‘grammar’ schools that taught this emerging class of office workers the practical mechanics of English and Latin. The grammar schools multiplied in the fifteenth century, and the demand for accessible low-price books that they helped generate was met by an invention that was to prove infinitely more important than considerations of who was nudging whom off the throne.

In 1469 William Caxton, an English merchant living in the prosperous Flemish trading town of Bruges, was finishing a book that he had researched. Caxton was a trader in rich cloths — a mercer like Richard Whittington — and books were his passion. He collected rare books, and he wrote for his own pleasure, scratching out the text laboriously with a quill on to parchment. The book he was currently completing was a history of the ancient Greek city of Troy, and the mercer, who was approaching his fiftieth birthday, was feeling weary. ‘My pen is worn, mine hand heavy, my eye even dimmed,’ he wrote. The prospect of copying out more versions of the manuscript for the friends who had expressed an interest was too much to contemplate. So Caxton decided to see what he could discover about the craft of printing, which had been pioneered by Johann Gutenberg in the 1440s in the Rhine Valley.

Travelling south-east from Bruges, he arrived on the Rhine nearly thirty years after Gutenberg had started work there. And having ‘practised and learned’ the technique for himself, the mercer turned printer went back to Bruges to set up his own press. In 1474 his History of Troy became the first book to be printed in English, and two years later he brought his press to England, setting up shop near the Chapter House, in the precinct of Westminster Abbey, where Parliament met.

Caxton had an eye for a good location. Along the route between the Palace of Westminster and the Chapter House shuttled lawyers, churchmen, courtiers, MPs — the book-buying elite of England. The former cloth trader also had an eye for a bestseller. The second book he printed was about chess, The Game and Play of the Chesse. Then came in fairly quick succession a French-English dictionary, a translation of Aesop’s fables, several popular romances, Malory’s tale of Camelot in the Morte D’Arthur, some school textbooks, a history of England, an encyclopaedia entitled The Myrrour of the Worlde, and Chaucer’s bawdy evergreen, The Canterbury Tales.

More than five hundred years later a copy of Caxton’s first edition of Chaucer became the most expensive book ever sold — knocked down at auction for £4.6 million. But in the fifteenth century the obvious appeal of the newly printed books lay in their value for money. Books became so commonplace that snobs sometimes employed scribes to copy Caxton’s printed editions back into manuscript — while both Church and government became alarmed at the access to new ideas that the printing press offered to a widening public.

Over the centuries Caxton’s innovation would marvellously stimulate diversity in thinking, but in one important respect its impact was to standardise. Caxton loved to write personal prefaces to his publications, explaining the background of the new book he was sharing with his readers, and in one of these he describes the difficulties of being England’s first mass publisher. He was in his study, he relates, feeling rather bereft, looking for a new project to get his teeth into, and happened to pick up the recently published French version of Virgil’s Aeneid. The editor in him couldn’t resist trying to translate the great epic poem into English. Taking a pen, he wrote out a page or two. But when he came to read through what he had written, he had to wonder whether his customers in different corners of England would be able to understand it, since ‘common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another’.

To make the point he recounted the tale of a group of English merchants who, when their ship was becalmed at the mouth of the Thames, decided to go ashore in search of a good breakfast. One of them asked for some ’eggys’, to be told by the Kentish wife that she did not understand French. Since the merchant himself only spoke and understood English, he started to get angry, until one of his companions said he would like some ’eyren’ — and the woman promptly reached for the egg basket.

’Loo,’ exclaimed Caxton, ‘what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte — egges or eyren?’

Even in this account you may notice that Caxton himself first spelled the word ’eggys’, then ’egges’ a few lines later. As the printer-publisher produced more and more books — and when he died in 1491 he was on the point of printing his hundredth — he made his own decisions about how words should be spelled. His choices tended to reflect the language of the south-east of England, with which he was familiar — he was proud to come from Kent, ’where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as is in any place of England.’

Many of Caxton’s spelling decisions and those of the printers who came after him were quite arbitrary. As they matched letters to sounds they followed no particular rules, and we live with the consequences to this day. So if you have ever wondered why a bandage is ‘wound’ around a ‘wound’, why ‘cough’ rhymes with ‘off’ while ‘bough’ rhymes with cow’, and why you might shed a ‘tear’ after seeing a ‘tear’ in your best dress or trousers, you have William Caxton to thank for the confusion.

John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln (d. 1494)

Lincoln Cathedral, arms of Bishop John Russell on enamelled brass escutcheon on his tomb in Russell Chantry.

Bishop John Russell of Lincoln was an important clerical servant of EDWARD IV and chancellor of England under RICHARD III.

Born in Winchester, Russell was educated at Oxford, where he taught until about 1462. In the mid-1460s, he entered the service of Edward IV, who employed Russell on various diplomatic missions, including the negotiations surrounding the marriage of the king’s sister, MARGARET OF YORK, to Duke CHARLES of BURGUNDY in 1468. In February 1471, Russell also acted as a diplomat for the READEPTION government of HENRY VI, but he was readily taken back into Yorkist service after Edward IV’s restoration in April. In 1472, Edward again sent Russell to Burgundy, and in 1474, the king appointed him keeper of the privy seal and dispatched him to SCOTLAND to negotiate a marriage between Edward’s daughter Cecily and the son of JAMES III. Russell became bishop of Rochester in 1476 and bishop of Lincoln in 1480. One of the executors of Edward IV’s will, Russell helped officiate at the king’s funeral in April 1483.

On 10 May 1483, Richard, duke of Gloucester, having assumed the protectorship of his nephew EDWARD V, dismissed Archbishop Thomas ROTHERHAM of York from the chancellorship, replacing him with Russell. According to some sources, the bishop, who was experienced and learned and a natural choice for the post, accepted office with reluctance. Although Russell served Gloucester loyally when he became king as Richard III, there seems to have been no close bond between Richard and his chancellor, who may have felt betrayed when Richard took his nephew’s crown in June 1483. In any event, as chancellor, Russell handled negotiations with both Scotland and BRITTANY, and he may have assisted Archbishop Thomas BOURCHIER in persuading Queen Elizabeth WOODVILLE to release her younger son, Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, into Gloucester’s custody. Having perhaps grown uncertain of his chancellor’s loyalty, Richard dismissed Russell from office on 29 July 1485, less than a month before the Battle of BOSWORTH FIELD. After Richard’s death, Russell was taken readily into favor by HENRYVII, who, like his Yorkist predecessors, employed the bishop as a diplomat. After spending his last years mainly in his diocese, Russell died in December 1494.

Because Russell closely fit the author profile that emerges from the work itself—an educated cleric who was familiar with the workings of Richard’s government and who was an eyewitness to at least some of the events being described—some modern historians identified Russell as the author of the CROYLAND CHRONICLE, a useful source for the last decade of Edward IV and for the reign of Richard III. However, most scholars today dismiss that claim, arguing that the Chronicle is much different in style from any of Russell’s known writings.

Further Reading: Ross, Charles, Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

Sir Thomas Malory, (c. 1416–1471)

The life and career of Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur), one of the greatest literary works of medieval England, illustrates how the quarrel between the houses of LANCASTER and YORK forced even politically insignificant members of the English GENTRY to choose sides.

Because little is known about the writer of Le Morte d’Arthur, historians have debated which of several fifteenth-century Thomas Malorys was the author. The most likely candidate is Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, a Warwickshire knight whose sketchily preserved life best fits the few facts definitely known about the Arthurian writer. In the concluding paragraphs of Le Morte d’Arthur, the author stated that the book was completed in the ninth year of EDWARD IV by “Sir Thomas Malory, knight,” and also requested his readers to pray “that God will send me good deliverance” (Malory, p. 750). The writer was thus an imprisoned knight who finished his work between 4 March 1469 and 3 March 1470.

Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was knighted about 1441, and served in PARLIAMENT in 1445 and again in 1449. Malory’s life in the 1440s was unexceptional, but he spent most of the 1450s in various LONDON jails. His imprisonment was the result of a crime spree that began in January 1450 when Malory reportedly lay in ambush, with armed men, to murder Humphrey STAFFORD, duke of Buckingham. In May and again in August, Malory was charged with rape and extortion. In June 1451, Malory and a band of accomplices were accused of stealing livestock, and, in July, Malory and his confederates threatened a house of Warwickshire monks, an action that led to the issuance of orders for his arrest. On 20 July, while Buckingham and a party of sixty men searched for him, Malory and his accomplices vandalized the duke’s deer park at Caludon.

Because such violent crimes conflict with the chivalric values enunciated in Le Morte d’Arthur, the authorship of the Newbold Revel Malory has been disputed. However, the charges against him may have had more to do with local political rivalries than with outright criminality. Malory’s transgressions, which probably originated in a private quarrel with Buckingham, soon entangled Malory in the national political struggle. After Malory’s capture in July 1451, the Lancastrian government imprisoned him without trial through the mid-1450s. Because the Lancastrians seemed intent on keeping him confined, and because he had shown himself capable of raising and leading large numbers of men, Malory probably attracted the attention of the Yorkists, who in the late 1450s were seeking any possible supporters. In 1457, after being temporarily released on bail through the good offices of the Yorkist lord, William NEVILLE, Lord Fauconberg, Malory likely became an adherent of Richard NEVILLE, earl of Warwick, Fauconberg’s nephew and Buckingham’s chief rival in Warwickshire. In early 1462, Malory used Edward IV’s general pardon to win his release and wipe out all charges against him. In late 1462, Malory participated in Edward’s campaign against the Lancastrian-held castles in northern England.

Although no legal records confirm the statement in Le Morte d’Arthur that he wrote while a prisoner, Malory was one of only fifteen people excluded by name from a general pardon issued by Edward IV in July 1468. This exclusion raises the likelihood that Malory was arrested by the Yorkist government some time in 1468 and remained in confinement until the restoration of HENRY VI in October 1470, over six months after the stated completion of Le Morte d’Arthur. Although the reasons for Malory’s imprisonment are unclear, the probability is that he was somehow involved in a shadowy Lancastrian conspiracy known as the CORNELIUS PLOT, which came to light in June 1468. Many of the men excluded from the pardon with Malory were Lancastrians implicated in the plot. According to his tombstone in Greyfriars Church in London, Malory died on 14 March 1471, only a month before the restoration of Edward IV would likely have again jeopardized his freedom.

Further Reading: Field, P. J.C., The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge:D. S. Brewer, 1993); Malory, Sir Thomas, Le Morte d’Arthur, edited by R. M. Lumiansky (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1982).