The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (19 page)

The air fairly crackled with violent intent, but mercifully the great council opened in peace, and after long discussions a deal was brokered between the Yorkists and their young opponents. York and Warwick agreed to give substantial sums of money in compensation to the bereaved families, as well as paying for St Albans Abbey to sing masses for the souls of the dead, a process supposed to hasten a spirit’s journey through Purgatory. The Neville and the Percy families both agreed to undertake four-thousand-mark bonds to keep the peace for ten years. This having been formally agreed, on 25 March – known generally as Lady Day, the feast of the Annunciation – the reconciled lords went out in public to show off their newfound mutual affection.

They processed along the militarised streets of London in rather astonishing fashion, each aggrieved lord walking arm in arm with the person towards whom he held the sharpest hatred. At the head of the parade went the fresh-faced Somerset, linked at the elbow with old Salisbury. Behind them came Exeter, walking in harmonious and brotherly tandem with the earl of Warwick. And at the back marched the oddest couple of them all: the regal person of Queen Margaret accompanied by her bitterest foe, Richard duke of York. Between them all, holding no one’s arm, came the faintly ridiculous figure of King Henry VI, master of the Love Day and supposed reconciler of his fractured realm. The party walked with all pomp towards the giddying spire of St Paul’s Cathedral, which was crammed with ‘the greatest multitude of people that day that was ever seen’, and a service gave thanks to God for the peace that had descended on England. The peace was further celebrated with a series of jousts and tournaments at the Tower of London and in the queen’s castle at Greenwich. But if the Love Day was meant to strike observers as two sets of lords now joined together in friendship, a perceptive watcher could have noted that the divisions between the realm’s noblemen, written in blood at St Albans, had in fact been
sharpened and polarised by a reconciliation in which they were forced to relive events before being lined up and marched before the watching populace as if in opposing teams.

Government in 1458 continued to bump along in financially constrained failure. Queen Margaret took the king and prince back to Coventry following the Love Day, and most of the lords who had filled London with armed men returned to their estates. But the city remained racked with riotous disorder, as did the south-west, Wales and the marches, and northern East Anglia. As the country seethed, the queen and the Yorkists continued to vie for power. In the autumn Margaret began to dismiss adherents of York and the Nevilles from their official posts, and bolstered her command by taking control of the royal revenues and official appointments.

One official position she could do nothing about, however, was that of Richard earl of Warwick as captain of Calais. Throughout the political turmoil of the late 1450s Warwick had held on to the post, which gave him command of the town’s garrison, a powerful standing force of royal soldiers. He had significant military resources, whose loyalty to him made him difficult to remove. This became a serious problem as Warwick turned his office to ends that were increasingly embarrassing and awkward for the government on the other side of the Channel. The Calais garrison was perpetually broke and payments to its men forever in arrears. To address this issue, and also to help cultivate his own buccaneering image, Warwick had begun to use Calais as a base for what amounted to piracy. Merchant ships from the Low Countries and Italy were attacked by rogue vessels launched at Calais, as was a fleet of ships carrying salt belonging to the Hanseatic League – the guild of trading cities along the coast of the North and Baltic Seas. Goods were plundered and sailors were bloodily slain. A similar fate befell a fleet of twenty-eight Spanish sails, which was ambushed by ships connected with Warwick in
the summer of 1458. The seamen ‘bickered’, to use one chronicler’s understated phrase. Actually, a massive naval battle was fought, in which the sea foamed red as more than two hundred Spaniards and eighty men of Calais lost their lives, with three hundred more wounded ‘right sore’.
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Warwick was summoned to Westminster in early 1459, to attend a council called to discuss matters that included further rumours of a planned French attack on the south coast of England. He came only reluctantly, aware that there was a strong feeling that he should be removed as soon as possible from his captaincy. His reticence was soon justified. While he was at court, a brawl broke out between his men and several of the king’s household, ‘insomuch that they would have slain the earl’. Whether or not this was a manufactured quarrel designed to do away with Warwick, it certainly seemed that way to him. When a further rumour reached him that he was to be imprisoned in the Tower, Warwick fled London on his barge and returned to Calais, undismissed but deeply troubled that he had narrowly escaped assassination. Relations between the Yorkists and the court were rapidly deteriorating.

From the late spring of 1459 both sides began to prepare once more for armed conflict. Margaret did so through her son’s authority. In May the court decamped again to Coventry, and letters were sent around the nearby counties requesting a military levy to come to the royal side: those who would not comply were threatened with prosecution. All around the midlands and the north-west men were privately recruited to the royal retinue and given little badges of allegiance in the form of Prince Edward’s livery: a swan with a crown around its neck. A great council was scheduled for June. Suspecting the worst, York and the Nevilles refused to attend, as did a number of their sympathisers, including Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury. For their non-attendance the Yorkists were openly denounced by Queen
Margaret. It seemed highly likely that the next step would be for the Crown to declare them traitors and to have them attainted: their families ruined forever by an act of parliament that stripped them of their lands and titles and reduced them to nothing. In York’s case, this would have meant removing his status as a member of the extended royal family and future claimant to the crown. It was the final provocation.

On 20 September Warwick returned from Calais, gathering several hundred men about him as he rode via Warwick Castle for a rendezvous with York and Salisbury at York’s base of Ludlow in the Welsh borders. Salisbury had already recruited an army: he had perhaps five thousand men behind him as he set out to ride south from the family seat at Middleham in Yorkshire. The chronicles of the time make it clear that Salisbury had raised his men not for show but for the fight, ‘dreading the malices of his enemies and especially of the queen and her company the which hated him deadly’.
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He was not mistaken. News of his army’s movement reached Coventry, and the court despatched James Tuchet, Lord Audley, to attempt an interception and seize the rogue earl.

Audley was an elderly man. At sixty-one, he had not seen action in the field since his last involvement in the French wars some twenty-eight years earlier. All the same, he was a powerful lord in the west midlands, who was able to raise large numbers of men from his lands in Cheshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire, and deploy them along the route on which the earl of Salisbury was marching. In a matter of days he assembled a force numbering somewhere between eight and twelve thousand, at the heart of which was a bristling cavalry: knights aboard powerful horses, both men and beasts heavily protected by clanking plate armour, helmets and breastplates that glinted dangerously when they caught the light. Audley’s large cavalry contingent was clearly intended to impress Salisbury and suggest to the Yorkists that
facing down the Crown and its loyal servants in a military show of strength would be no idle task.

On the morning of 23 September, Audley marched his men along the road that ran between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Market Drayton in Shropshire. Scouts soon encountered the first signs of Salisbury’s army. To block Salisbury’s path Audley drew his men up in battle formation at Blore Heath, a large open patch of sloping ground bounded by a light wood and a small stream now known as Hempmill Brook. It was behind this stream that Audley’s forces stood, their front perhaps a mile long and partially defended by a thick band of hedgerow.
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Salisbury’s men were ranged opposite them on the slope, their front only around two-thirds as long, but their lines well defended. Behind them was a deep trench, and in the front line Salisbury’s archers stood protected by deadly sharpened stakes hammered into the ground, a classic device for thwarting and slaughtering onrushing horsemen, who would impale their animals on the fierce spikes if they decided to charge rather than dismount and fight on foot. On the flanks, Salisbury and his men were sheltered by the wood and a formation of wagons which had been chained together to form a barricade. While his defences were tight, the earl nonetheless realised that the odds were against him: not only was he outnumbered by perhaps two to one, but the queen was waiting less than ten miles away in Eccleshall with a second army, and a third army under the Stanley brothers – Thomas, Lord Stanley and Sir William Stanley – hung back slightly closer, supposedly awaiting royal commands to intervene on Audley’s side.

With both sides in strong defensive formations, Salisbury took the initiative with a feint: around midday his men began to recouple the horses to their wagons, as if they were preparing to fall back from the heath. Audley took the bait and sent his cavalry out to give chase. Unfortunately, in order to do so they had to cross the brook in front of them. Wading through the
water slowed their progress and made them vulnerable to attack by Salisbury’s archers. A storm of arrows fell from the sky, raining death upon the advancing horses and their riders. Men were catapulted from their dying mounts, only to be chopped down by the infantry. Those who survived were forced to flee back out of the archers’ range, to the lines on the other side of the brook. Audley sent a second mounted charge across the water; but they too were driven back in a vicious hail of wood and steel sent from Salisbury’s bowmen.

At this point, the Stanleys’ army, waiting close at hand, might have been expected to join the fray. But the Stanleys, as arch pragmatists, were always wary of committing their men to a battle whose outcome seemed anything less than completely certain. Thomas, Lord Stanley simply kept his troops back, while Sir William Stanley actually sent reinforcements to Salisbury’s side. In the end, Audley had no choice but to change tactics. He abandoned the cavalry charge and led about four thousand of his men, including large numbers of dismounted knights, in an advance on foot. A furious hand-to-hand battle began, steel ripping into flesh and men hurling themselves at one another in close quarter. Although Audley was an ageing commander and his tactics had been seriously naïve, he did not lack personal valour. He fought in the thick of the battle. But in the mêlée he was sought out by one Sir Roger Kynaston of Hordley, a retainer of the duke of York, who was among Salisbury’s knights. In the open field, where the ground sloped gently downwards, Audley eventually lost his valiant stand. He was hacked down and killed, and his assistant commander, John Sutton, Lord Dudley, was taken prisoner. The loyalists had lost their leader, and soon gave up the fight. The battle lasted in total around four hours and by the end of it perhaps two thousand men lay dead in the field, their blood seeping into the warm autumn soil. Audley was buried at Darley Abbey in Derbyshire and a stone cross (which still stands) was erected at
Blore Heath, where he fell. In later years local people would refer to the battlefield as ‘Deadman’s Den’.
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After Blore Heath, Salisbury took the majority of his men onwards to the south, to meet with his son Warwick and York. Victory had cost him considerable casualties, and he weakened his forces further by allowing his two youngest sons, Sir Thomas and Sir John Neville, to take a significant number of soldiers back north: on their way the Neville boys were both captured and imprisoned in Chester Castle. Meanwhile Salisbury’s remaining forces were pursued into the marches by the main royal army, which now included around twenty of the peers of the realm. They met up with York and Warwick, but by now their ranks were disappointingly thin and they were outnumbered by around three to one. In desperation, the three Yorkist lords came together at Worcester Cathedral, and in great solemnity swore oaths to protect one another. Then they retreated to York’s nearby castle of Ludlow, where on 10 October they wrote jointly to Henry VI, protesting their ‘humble obeisance and reverence’ before condemning the realm’s misgovernment, the failure of the law and the violence rampant throughout the kingdom. They also complained of the ‘impatience and violence of such persones as intend of extreme malice to proceed under the shadow of your high might and presence to our destruction’.
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The letters may have reached the king and his councillors, but after Blore Heath they were hardly in the mood to listen sympathetically. Just as at St Albans, a Yorkist army had been raised against the peace of the realm, and blood – some of it noble blood – had been spilled. Messages returned across the midlands from the court: the rebellious lords were to lay down their arms and beg for the royal pardon within six days. They refused, and another armed confrontation became inevitable. Audley and his
men may have been dead and defeated, but another large royal army was closing in.

By the second week of October the Yorkists were camped in fields south of Ludlow. Above them, on high ground, brooded Ludlow Castle, with huge turrets and towers, vast arched doorways and narrow windows, and sheets of stoutly defended walls over which fluttered the duke of York’s arms. In front of Ludlow the river Teme swirled cold and fast, the only route across it into the town passing over the thick, recently built stone thoroughfare known as Ludford Bridge. On the south bank of the Teme, below the bridge, the rebel lords’ army was drawn up.