My Kingdom for a Horse by Ed West

Author:Ed West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

This Sun of York

That the Yorkists won was down to the support of London, which was vastly richer than anywhere else in England, due to its role in the export of wool and other staples. In the nine months before Towton, the city provided thirteen thousand pounds for the Yorkist cause, enough to pay twenty-six archers for twenty days’ service.54

And now the city merchants had a king worthy of the name, the very opposite of the dull-witted Henry in every respect. Edward of March, also known as Edward of Rouen after his birthplace, had been born in Normandy but raised mostly in Ludlow. He had inherited his mother’s good looks and was ‘very tall … exceeding the stature of almost all others, of comely visage, pleasant in expression, broad chested.’ As well as being a giant—he stood at six feet, three inches—Edward was handsome, fair-haired, and blessed with charisma and natural affability, as well as a winning smile. He ‘was so genial in his greeting, that if he saw a newcomer bewildered at his appearance and royal magnificence, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand upon his shoulder.’55 He also had that knack of remembering the names of everyone under him, as well as something about them with which to make small talk.

Knowing how powerful the city of London had become, the new king took leading merchants away for team-bonding weekends, where they played sports in the morning and drank themselves senseless in the afternoon. These male-bonding sessions would involve risqué jokes, but also had a more sordid side, with women passed among them—for in sexual matters Edward was also the opposite of his predecessors, a compulsive womanizer with a string of illegitimate children.

Italian chronicler Dominic Mancini heard that Edward seduced women with money and promises, ‘pursued indiscriminately married and unmarried, noble and low-born,’ and supposedly tricked one highborn woman, Lady Eleanor Butler, into his bed by promising her marriage; this would cause problems later. Another Italian, Polydore Vergil, said Edward tried to rape one of Warwick’s relatives under his roof, although Mancini said he never used force, only lies, and then ‘as soon as he grew tired with the affair,’ he passed them onto other courtiers. According to French diplomat Philippe de Commynes, the king of England ‘thought nothing but upon women, and that more than reason would, and on hunting, and on the comfort of the person.’

Edward boasted he had three concubines, each with a special gift, ‘one the merriest, another the wisest, the third the holiest harlot in the realm, as one whom no man could get out of the church lightly to any place but it were his bed,’ according to Thomas More, writing in the reign of Edward’s grandson, the equally corpulent and sex-mad Henry VIII. The king’s favorite was Jane Shore, who was famously promiscuous and kindhearted.

In contrast to Henry’s dreary and pious court, Edward’s was like a teenage boy’s vision of being in a music video. Sitting

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