She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (53 page)

Filling the stomachs on which her army marched was no easy task in the dead of winter – and this winter was worse than any England had experienced in decades. Torrential rain all summer long had turned pastures to mud and rotted crops in the ground, so that stores could not be laid down as usual for the cold season, and belts had been tightened even before Margaret’s army faced its journey southward. Already by 12 January the soldiers had begun to pillage and plunder the villages and towns through which they passed – violence which the queen and her commanders did little or nothing to restrain, partly because of the pressing need for the troops to eat, and partly because some of the lands which they left ravaged in their wake belonged to the dead duke of York. Margaret could see the value in such a potent demonstration of the penalties for resistance, as well as the evident necessity for her soldiers to be fed, but she did not foresee the devastating effect of the rumours and reports that flew ahead on the road to London. Her strategy had always been to build territorial power into military might, but the unease that already existed in the south-east about her identification with the midlands and the north had now crystallised into alienation and fear.

When a young gentleman named Clement Paston wrote from London to his elder brother in Norfolk on 23 January, it was clear
how far the people of the Yorkist-held capital now saw the conflict as a war between north and south. ‘In this country every man is willing to go with my lords here’, he wrote, ‘and I hope God shall help them, for the people in the north rob and steal and are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in all the south country, and that will ask a mischief.’ And the earl of Warwick, raising men and munitions in London and across the south-east, was doing what he could to exploit those fears, demanding aid against the ‘misruled and outrageous people in the north parts’ who were ‘coming toward these parts to the destruction thereof ’.

His preparations were given a much-needed fillip in early February when news broke that Edward of March, now the new duke of York after his father’s death, had won a crushing victory at Mortimer’s Cross in the Welsh borders over an army commanded by Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke. Tudor himself had escaped, but his father Owen – second husband of the late Queen Catherine, and King Henry’s stepfather – had been captured and executed after the battle. (At sixty, he had not lost the charms that had won him the hand of a queen: a ‘mad woman’ tenderly washed his severed head and combed his hair, one chronicler reported, and lit a hundred candles to illuminate its resting place on Hereford’s market cross.)

Heartened by the knowledge that Edward was heading eastward to join him, Warwick led his troops twenty miles north from London to St Albans, intending to halt the queen’s army in its tracks and hold off any assault on the capital. With him rode King Henry – a token of legitimacy so uncomprehending that his capacity to strike awe into soldiers who stood against him was now, it seemed, long gone. So it proved on 17 February when Margaret’s troops, under the aggressively skilful command of the duke of Somerset, swarmed into the town. For the second time in six years, swords clashed in the streets and the cobbles of the market square were left sticky with blood. But this time Somerset secured his revenge for the defeat that had cost his father his life; this time
it was the Yorkists who lost both the battle and the person of the king. Henry was found sitting obediently under a tree, and taken to St Albans Abbey where his wife and son were waiting to greet him.

Still Margaret had not destroyed her enemies. Warwick survived the encounter at St Albans but was forced to retreat northward – the pirate captain of Calais feeling the sting of his first military defeat – to join forces with his cousin Edward in the Cotswolds on 22 February. But Yorkist hopes now hung by a thread. If Edward and Warwick could get to London before the queen’s army they might still save themselves and their cause, but the capital was four days’ forced march away, and Margaret’s troops had already advanced to Barnet, just ten miles from the city gates. They marched in any case, in defiance and desperation, placing their faith in their own skill and the support they knew they commanded among the Londoners.

Margaret, meanwhile, seemed to have her pieces poised on the chessboard for one final, inexorable assault. Her husband, feeble though he might be, was back at her side. Her army, in which every soldier wore the badge of her young son, had won two famous victories, and the capital lay before her. And her leadership in the name of the king and prince was amply acknowledged by the deputation the Londoners sent to treat with her army, which was led by three women: the dowager duchess of Bedford, who had accompanied Margaret on her first journey to England fifteen years earlier; Emma, Lady Scales, who had been a lady-in-waiting in Margaret’s household as queen; and the widowed duchess of Buckingham, who was Prince Edward’s godmother.

In the fact of that deputation, however, lay Margaret’s problem. Her army desperately needed food and provisions, but the Londoners were not willing simply to open their gates and their stores. The Yorkist sympathies of many of the capital’s inhabitants were now compounded by their terror of the rabble of northerners they had heard so much about; they had ample evidence of the devastation Margaret’s army had left in its wake on its march
south, and of the queen’s implacability in pursuit of those who opposed her. The question was whether the queen’s wrath could now be staved off by prompt compliance, or whether the city was already doomed by its previous resistance. An exchange of letters between the mayor and the queen produced the unsettlingly vague promise that ‘the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city … but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish the evildoers’. Clearly Margaret was not, after five years of fighting, about to offer an amnesty to those who had stood against her.

As the city council wrestled with this alarming dilemma, its officers were struggling even to keep order within the city walls. An attempt was made to send carts piled high with food as a placatory offering to the queen’s encampment at Barnet, but hostile crowds, enraged by fear and panic, gathered to stop the convoy before it could pass through Cripplegate on the north road out of the city. ‘That day this place was in an uproar’, an Italian observer in London reported – pandemonium which was fuelled by the rumours that had begun to reach the city that the Yorkists were on their way.

Time was running out. Confronted with this violence and disarray, with the urgent need to feed her soldiers, and with the impossibility of forcing her way into a city whose support she needed and whose defences were impregnable, Margaret for once decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Retreating and regrouping had worked for her before, and now she had little choice but to believe that it could do so again. She pulled her army back twenty miles north-westward to Dunstable; and then, knowing that the arrival of the Yorkist army was imminent and that, without provisions and supplies, her troops were in no position to fight, she gave the order to march north. Her army wheeled away from the capital, still looting as it went.

As Margaret retreated, Edward of York and his cousin of Warwick were advancing at speed – and when they reached the capital they could scarcely believe what they found. Overwhelmed with
relief at their release from the threat of the queen’s vengeance, the Londoners threw open their gates to welcome the Yorkists. Edward, whose cause had seemed lost on his frantic chase across country, now rode into the city unopposed and triumphant. And, extraordinarily, he did so as a king-in-waiting.

York had been Margaret’s greatest enemy but not, it turned out, her greatest threat. At eighteen, Edward was everything her ineffectual and distracted husband was not. Unusually tall, strongly built and jaw-droppingly handsome, he had irresistible charisma, combining easy bonhomie with an imperious will and a shrewd political brain that had been honed by early experience as his father’s trusted lieutenant. Amid the devastation of the Yorkists’ military hopes, his precocious skill as a general had been demonstrated in his victory over Jasper Tudor’s army at Mortimer’s Cross. He was neither the treason-tainted political maverick that his father had been, nor the limp puppet that Henry now was. He looked more like a king than anyone had seen in years, and he could claim technical justification for the sudden suggestion that the crown might in fact be his, since Henry, so the argument went, in ‘deciding’ to rejoin Margaret at St Albans had reneged on his oath to recognise York as his heir and in effect resigned his throne.

But the strength of Edward’s position went way beyond the theoretical. Margaret’s aggressive territorialism had turned southern England into enemy country, and the fact that she had been forced to impersonate the authority of a husband and son who were unable to act for themselves had ended up exposing, rather than concealing, Henry’s wretched failure as king. In the eyes of the Londoners at least, Edward offered a fresh start, hope amid a landscape of devastation and chaos; and when on 4 March he processed in state from St Paul’s to the palace of Westminster to take his seat on the throne that his father had never won, he was followed by thronging crowds who hollered and bellowed their approval.

Nine days later, therefore, when Edward left London at the head of his troops, the ground-rules of the conflict had changed
dramatically. Both sides – Margaret’s army in the north, and Edward’s in the south – now had a king to fight for. The unique authority of the crown was so compromised that these two rival monarchs would meet for the first time on equal terms, the last king standing to claim the prize. And so on Palm Sunday, 29 March, after a deliberately measured and orderly march north, Edward and Warwick took up position outside Towton, a Yorkshire village only a few miles from the battlefield where the duke of York and the earl of Salisbury had died just three months earlier. There they faced an army commanded by the duke of Somerset and the earl of Northumberland who, like Edward and Warwick, had lost their fathers in these wars. Whatever happened at Towton, it promised to be the last act in a political conflict that had become infused with all the emotional resonance and murderous violence of a blood feud.

Margaret, meanwhile, had no choice but to wait, powerless as she was to intervene while her soldiers did their work. This time her husband and son were with her, safe within York’s city walls: if Henry now served no purpose in rallying his troops, there was no sense in risking his presence on the battlefield. As she paced restlessly, intent and silent, she had no way of knowing, as hour gave way to hour, that the fighting ten miles away was still relentless. On both sides the order had been given that there would be no quarter, no mercy; and neither side would give way, while the corpses heaped up between them, entangling living feet in the twisted and broken limbs of the dead. For eight hours the slaughter continued, in driving snow that blinded stinging eyes and numbed clumsy fingers, the bitter cold catching each ragged, gasping breath. When some at last turned to run in exhaustion and fear, it was to find their path blocked by the river Wharfe and their final rest in its freezing waters. And all the while, new rivulets of melting snow stained red with blood were snaking through the frozen furrows of the road that led towards York and Margaret.

Blood could not speak, but messengers could, sobbing from their exertions in the cold and the dreadful burden of the news
they brought. Thousands upon thousands had died at Towton. And, in the end, it was Margaret’s army that had shattered. As the light began to fade, Edward of York stood unchallenged in command of the field, king of England in fact as well as in name. And three muffled figures with a handful of guards rode hard on the route north toward Scotland: a grim-faced woman, a bewildered man and a frightened seven-year-old boy, no longer England’s royal family but hunted fugitives.

 

Identity had been at the heart of Margaret’s difficulties in the long years of struggle for her husband’s throne. Henry’s inadequacies had left the mantle of kingship hanging limp and empty, and although Margaret had supplied the will and purpose to animate his cause, she could not, as a woman and a wife, simply inhabit the role he had left so damagingly vacant.

Now Margaret had no choice but to watch as those same questions of identity underpinned the creation of a new regime that promised to destroy everything she had ever worked for. The mantle of kingship rested squarely on the broad shoulders of Edward of York. He was forceful, decisive, energetic, magnetic; he promised leadership of a kind England had not experienced since the death of Henry’s father forty years earlier. ‘Words fail me to relate how well the commons love and adore him, as if he were their god,’ reported an Italian resident in London a fortnight after Edward’s victory at Towton. ‘Thus far, he appears to be a just prince who intends to amend and organise matters otherwise than has been done hitherto …’ And when this new king was anointed in Westminster Abbey on 28 June – a golden boy in a golden crown – it seemed that God was merely confirming what was already evident in his talents, his actions and the fact of his victory.