The Demon's Brood (35 page)

On 29 March, at Towton in Yorkshire, Edward attacked the royal army, which was led by the Duke of Somerset – son of the man killed at St Albans in 1455. It was Palm Sunday, and Henry spent the day in prayer at York. In a blizzard, nearly 40,000 men fought the bloodiest battle in English history, the royalists shouting, ‘King Henry! King Henry!' (That so many fought to the death for him shows how strongly they believed in his cause.) During the afternoon the combat turned in favour of the Yorkists when the Duke of Norfolk's troops arrived, but Henry's army did not break until the evening. Then it was annihilated, most of its leaders dying on the battlefield, in the pursuit or on the headman's block.

While their enemies stormed into York from the south, Henry and Margaret galloped out from the north into the snowy dark with wardrobes and money-bags strapped to packhorses. They found shelter in Scotland, first at Linlithgow Palace and then at the Dominican friary in Edinburgh. Henry ordered Berwick to surrender to the Scots, while small Lancastrian garrisons occupied the castles of Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh.

In October 1463 he returned to England, installing himself at Bamburgh to reign over a tiny area of Northumberland. He
never saw his wife and son again – Margaret had gone to France to obtain help from Louis XI, offering him Calais. In May 1464 the last Lancastrian army was defeated at Hexham and Henry, who during the battle had been in Bywell Castle nearby, was almost caught, leaving behind his cap of state. He evaded capture for over a year with the help of his carver, Sir Richard Tunstall, hiding in Lancashire and Westmorland, but in June 1465, was betrayed by a monk and captured while fording the Ribble at Bungerly Hippingstones. His sole companions were a squire and two clergymen, one of whom was a former Dean of Windsor.

Taken south, Henry was led through the City, wearing an old straw hat, his feet tied beneath his horse's belly, before disappearing into the Tower of London. In no danger while his son remained alive, he was allowed to receive visitors. One tried to behead him with a dagger, inflicting so grave a wound that he thought he had killed him and ran off. Characteristically, when Henry regained the throne he forgave the man.
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He retreated into his world of mysticism and visions, probably happier than he had been for years.

In 1466 the bones of Thomas of Lancaster at Pontefract were rumoured to be sweating blood again, for Edward IV had grown unpopular. In France Queen Margaret schemed implacably and in England there were numerous Lancastrian plots. Then the Earl of Warwick turned against Edward, who fled abroad. Having allied with Margaret and betrothed his younger daughter Anne to Henry's son, on 6 October 1470 Warwick announced that Henry VI had reascended the throne in the ‘Readeption'. As the Cambridge don Dr Warkworth puts it, ‘all his lovers were full glad, and the more part of [the] people'.
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At the Tower, the earl found him ‘not worshipfully arrayed as a prince, and not so cleanly kept as should [be]seem such a prince: they had him out and new arrayed him and did to him great
reverence, and brought him to the palace of Westminster, and so he was restored to the crown'.

A week later, he was recrowned at St Paul's, since ‘an overwhelming majority of the politically active wanted him back'.
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As if Towton had never happened, new coins were struck bearing his name, while in November he presided over a parliament attended by thirty-four peers, to whom Warwick's brother Archbishop George Neville preached a sermon on the text ‘Turn, O backsliding children'. Warwick was made Lieutenant of the Realm with full powers. Henry asserted himself only in appointing Sir Richard Tunstall, the companion of his wanderings, as Lord Chamberlain. The one significant gesture he made during the Readeption was to prophesy that Henry Tudor would wear the crown, and even this is questionable.
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Apart from opening parliament, he rarely appeared in public, spending his time quietly in the Bishop of London's palace at Fulham.

In March 1471, Edward IV landed in Yorkshire, gathered an army and proclaimed himself king. Henry, who rode through the streets of London with Archbishop Neville leading him by the hand, cut a forlorn figure as he tried to persuade its citizens to fight for him. Outmanoeuvring Warwick, Edward marched into the capital on 11 April. Henry found himself a prisoner again – the Readeption was over. Two days later, Edward marched out, taking his rival with him, and on 14 April destroyed Warwick's army at Barnet, the earl being killed. On 4 May he annihilated the last Lancastrian army at Tewkesbury.

A Yorkist account says blandly that Henry died from melancholy at the news of Tewkesbury. But, writing a decade later, Warkworth records, ‘the same night that King Edward came [back] to London, King Harry being inward in prison in the Tower of London was put to death, the 21st May, on a Tuesday night between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward, and many other'.
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(When his skeleton was examined in 1910, the hair was found matted with blood, which suggests a blow to
the head.) Put on display at St Paul's, in an open coffin so all might see his face, his corpse was rumoured to have bled on the cathedral pavement, a sign of sanctity.

Poor key-cold figure of a holy King!

Pale ashes of the house of Lancaster!
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After a discreet funeral at Blackfriars, the coffin was taken by barge up the Thames for obscure burial at Chertsey Abbey.

Henry VI's inadequacy was a major cause of the Wars of the Roses, yet no king who lost his throne has ever been so popular. After his murder many of his subjects venerated him as a martyr, and by 1473 prayers were being said before his image on a stone screen in York Minster that portrayed the kings of England. In 1479 Edward had it removed, besides trying vainly to prevent pilgrims from flocking to Henry's grave at Chertsey.

Richard III reburied him in St George's Chapel, where his tomb attracted no fewer pilgrims than Becket's at Canterbury. He was credited with many miracles, generally of healing – the most spectacular were bringing back to life a plague victim who was being sewn into her shroud, and preventing the rope from hanging a man falsely accused of theft. In churches and cathedrals throughout the land, he was commemorated with images on rood screens, in stained glass windows and paintings, with fervent hymns and prayers composed in his honour. As Stubbs puts it, he ‘left a mark on the hearts of Englishmen that was not soon effaced . . . the king who had perished for the sins of his fathers and of the nation'.
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Before the break with Rome, as heirs of the Lancastrians the Tudors hoped to have him canonized, planning to rebury his remains in their new chapel at Westminster. Even after the rupture, the banner of ‘King Henry the Saint' was carried at Henry VIII's funeral.

Catholics continued to venerate him. In 1713 Alexander Pope referred to the ‘Martyr–King' in his poem
Windsor Forest
, while during the 1920s there was an unsuccessful campaign to secure his canonization.
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Later, he became one of Evelyn Waugh's favourite saints.

It was in the hour of need that his genius showed itself, cool, rapid, subtle, utterly fearless, moving straight to its aim through clouds of treachery and intrigue, and striking hard when its aim was reached . . . His indolence and gaiety were in fact mere veils thrown over a will of steel

John Richard Green
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The reason why the Yorkists won at Towton was Edward IV's leadership. Even in a snowstorm, he stood out. A giant in ‘white' (burnished) armour with a coronet on his helmet, wherever he pushed his way forward his pole-axe felled every enemy who dared to face him.

For Stubbs, Edward was ‘vicious far beyond any king that England had seen since the days of John, and more cruel and
bloodthirsty than any king she had ever known'.
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But Stubbs could not forgive him for destroying a Lancastrian constitution that never existed. There were Victorians who disagreed with Stubbs, such as Green, with whom the king's contemporaries would certainly have sided. Thomas More, only five when Edward died, but friendly with men who had known him, says he was ‘of heart courageous, politic in counsel, in adversity nothing abashed, in prosperity rather joyful than proud, in peace just and merciful, in war sharp and fierce, in the field bold and hardy'.
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Edward IV gave England the firm rule she had lacked for decades. The best-looking man of his day, with a magnetic personality, he ended by being worshipped by his subjects who overlooked his massacres as well as murders, that included his predecessor, his brother and his brother-in-law.

Edward was born on 28 April 1442 at Rouen where his father Richard, Duke of York was Lieutenant General of Lancastrian France. His mother Cicely Neville, the Earl of Westmorland's eighteenth child, was known in the north country as the Rose of Raby from her beauty. (Stories of Edward being the bastard of an archer called Blaybourne when York was away are ridiculous – if the duke was defending Pontoise at the time the boy was conceived, he could have commuted to Rouen quickly enough, on a ballinger along the Seine.) His nurse was a Norman girl, Anne of Caux, to whom he gave a large pension after he became king. He spent most of his childhood in the great castle at Ludlow, York's favourite residence.

In 1454 Edward was created Earl of March. The next year, barely thirteen, he accompanied his father to St Albans, and presumably watched the battle. When the duke and his friends fled from Ludford Bridge, instead of going to Ireland with his father, Edward went to Calais with Salisbury and York, returning
with them to London in summer 1459. Had he ridden north with York in December, history might have been different – his brother the Earl of Rutland was stabbed to death after the Battle of Wakefield by Lord Clifford, who shouted, ‘By God's blood, thy father slew mine and so will I and all thy kin!'
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March had gone to crush Henry's army in south Wales, 2,000 strong and led by Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, which was marching towards London to join Queen Margaret. On 2 February 1461 it was intercepted by Edward with a slightly larger force, on the banks of the River Lug at Mortimer's Cross near Leominster. His men were alarmed at seeing three suns in the sky (a ‘sundog') but he assured them it was a good omen – ‘therefore let us have a good heart and in the name of almighty God, go we against our enemies!'
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In his first battle as a commander, he routed Jasper Tudor's men, who became bogged down advancing over marshy ground, then launched a ferocious pursuit. When sensing victory Edward always gave the order, ‘Kill the gentles and spare the commons!',
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sending captured enemy leaders to the block. Among the dozen beheaded this time was Owen Tudor, the former husband of King Henry's late mother.

Then he joined forces in the Cotswolds with Warwick, who had just escaped from defeat at St Albans. Fourteen years older, the ‘Kingmaker', Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick had married the heiress of the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick (just as his father married the heiress of the Montague Earls of Salisbury) and become England's richest magnate, while the deaths of his father and his uncle York turned him into an elder statesman. If a poor soldier, prone to panic and losing the two battles where he commanded, Warwick was a redoubtable fighting seaman who when Captain of Calais rid the Channel of pirates. He was also an exceptionally wily and determined politician, his young cousin relying on his support.

Shaken by Margaret's victory at St Albans, the pair knew they were dead men without a king of their own. March therefore
claimed the throne as his father's son and by right of the Accord of 1460, riding into London on 28 February. He was warmly welcomed, if observers noted that apart from Warwick there were few great lords with him – his only other ally of substance, the Duke of Norfolk, was absent, raising East Anglia. At Westminster on 4 March, although not crowned king, ‘Edward IV' was invested with the Confessor's regalia.

On 13 March he rode out from the City to find and destroy Margaret, driving his army of about 16,000 men so hard that regardless of snow and bad roads it covered 180 miles in sixteen days. He then engaged an army of fellow countrymen numbering approximately 20,000 who firmly believed that Henry VI was their rightful sovereign.

The Lancastrians occupied a strong defensive position on higher ground, but the wind blew the snow into their faces so that the Yorkist archers outshot them. Forced to come down and fight at close quarters, they held their own for six hours. Even after the Duke of Norfolk arrived with Yorkist reinforcements and charged their flank, they fought on into the dusk before breaking. Thousands were killed as they tried to flee over the narrow bridge across the River Cock or drowned in the little river which was in spate. An area of snow-covered ground 6 miles long and 3 miles wide was red with blood – heralds are said to have counted 28,000 bodies, although 16,000 is a more likely figure. Edward had ordered his men to give no quarter, and magnates and gentry taken prisoner were beheaded on the battlefield.
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