the extent to which Henry VI's personal authority (and by implication the authority of his office) had declined that blame for the disasters of his reign was being attached to him personally, to the degree of seeing him removed from the throne. In 1460 Edward's father, Richard, duke of York, failed in a bid to supplant Henry VI and was killed in battle, but just a few months later 18-year-old Edward was acclaimed as King in London.
The first decade of Edward IV's reign saw him preoccupied with defeating residual opposition from those who remained loyal to the deposed King, and left him with only limited room to develop his own policies. Yet from 1471, when Edward was secure on his throne after overcoming an unholy alliance of the remaining Henrician loyalists with some of his own disaffected former allies, which had temporarily restored Henry VI to the throne, he had the necessary freedom to make his own mark.
An important concern was the enforcement of law and order in the English regions. The question of how to convert the abstract authority which the Crown conveyed to its officers into something akin to the very real power commanded by local landowners and nobles in their shires was one which confronted successive kings throughout the middle ages. The traditional answer to this question had been attempts to harness the local leadership to the Crown's cause by appointing its members and their retainers to office. The problem which this approach in turn generated was that it took a vigorous king to keep the magnates and gentry in check when they for their part offended, and even an active monarch could not be everywhere at once. It had been one of the consequences of Henry VI's incapacity that aristocratic feuding had become endemic. Edward IV did not in the first place abandon this traditional approach to local government. He did, however, set about impressing his personal authority throughout his realm: he went on frequent judicial progresses through the regions, personally assumed the judgment seat of the principal court of King's bench at Westminster, and asserted the authority of his Crown as vested in his justices in the shires by sending out with them royal servants wearing his livery and badges. …