Note Back to Main Text — INDEX TO THE FIRST VOLUME

9. Edward IV. prepares for War with France. 1471—1474.—Edward IV. was now all powerful. He had no competitor to fear. No descendant of Henry IV. remained alive. Of the Beauforts, the descendants of John of Gaunt by Catherine Swynford (see p. 282), the male line had perished, and the only representative was young Henry, Earl of Richmond, whose mother, the Lady Margaret, was the daughter of the first Duke of Somerset, and the cousin of the two dukes who had been executed after the battles of Hexham and Tewkesbury.[32] His father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who died before his birth, was the son of a Welsh gentleman of no great mark, who had had the luck to marry Catherine of France, the widow of Henry V. The young Richmond was, however, an exile, and, as he was only fourteen years of age when Edward was restored, no serious danger was as yet to be apprehended from that side. Moreover, the slaughter amongst both the Yorkist and the Lancastrian nobility had, for the time, put an end to all danger of a rising. Edward was, therefore, at liberty to carry out his own foreign policy. He obtained grants from Parliament to enable him, in alliance with Charles of Burgundy, to make war against Louis XI. The grants were insufficient, and he supplemented them by a newly invented system of benevolences, which were nominally free gifts made to him by the well-to-do, but which were in reality exactions, because those from whom they were required dared not refuse to pay. The system raised little general ill will, partly because the small owners of property who were relieved from taxation were not touched by the benevolences, and partly because the end which Edward had put to the civil war made his government welcome. In some cases his personal charm counted for something. One old lady whom he asked for ten pounds replied that for the sake of his handsome face she would give him twenty. He kissed her and she at once made it forty.