The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (21 page)

His peers were shocked. The central tenet of Yorkist opposition – indeed of all opposition to Henry VI’s rule – had always been the assertion that those who surrounded the king were
enemies and traitors. Indeed, everything that had been done in England since the death of Henry V had been to preserve the power and authority of the king and crown – whether the king was a baby, an easily swayed adolescent, a naïve young man, a dribbling lunatic or a defeated, world-weary shell of a thing, prematurely ready for the grave. This was the realm’s first political principle. To depose or attempt to replace a king who was not actively tyrannical (as Edward II and Richard II had been) was not just wrong, it was nearly unthinkable. And for all his failings, Henry VI was the opposite of a tyrant.

After more than fifteen years of opposition, York had crossed the line. It was an action not openly approved by his allies (although it is possible that Warwick suspected York’s intentions) and regarded with amazement by his enemies.

The most likely explanation for it lay in the person of his one remaining enemy: the queen. Edmund duke of Somerset, Humphrey duke of Buckingham, the old earl of Northumberland, the young earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Beaumont were all dead. James earl of Wiltshire, Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke and others survived, but they were not the principal threat. This lay, manifestly, with Queen Margaret – and with her conduit to practical power in the seven-year-old Edward, prince of Wales. A queen and a little boy could not very well be killed, yet every day that she lived increased Margaret’s hatred for York. So long as her son was heir to the crown she, and subsequently he, would stand opposed to York’s survival and ambition. The only solution was for York to position himself either as king or – as his cousin Henry V had done in France under the terms of the treaty of Troyes in 1420 – as the king’s heir. Both options would disinherit Prince Edward and thereby neuter the queen. In terms of raw power politics, the decision made sense. Practically, though, it was a catastrophic misjudgement.

York had renounced his duty of obedience to Henry VI some
time before he met Cecily in Abingdon. The sword carried before him was the most obvious sign of this, but he had also stopped using Henry’s regnal year to date his documents.
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He seems to have been confident that, having been lauded for years by the commons of England (albeit not all of the lords) as a man with the credentials to occupy the throne, he would sweep into his new position to the sound of cheers and celebration.

In this he was sorely disappointed. At ten o’clock in the morning on Friday 10 October York arrived at the palace of Westminster, where parliament was sitting, with several hundred men on horseback. He entered the palace with his sword still borne before him and stormed through the Great Hall. High in the wooden arches of the hammer-beam ceiling, Henry Yevele’s famous fifteen statues of historical English kings stared impassively down upon the latest man to lay violent claim to the crown they had all worn. York marched on, bursting into the Painted Chamber to find the parliamentary lords assembled before an empty throne. Standing before his peers as his servants held the cloth of state over his head, York ‘gave them knowledge that he purposed not to lay down his sword but to challenge his right’.
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He was staking his claim to the crown on the basis that his right in blood, descending twice from Edward III, via the Mortimer and York lines, was superior to that of the king or prince of Wales, and ‘that no man shuld have denied the crown from his head’.
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There was a stunned silence. He then retired to take up lodgings in the queen’s chambers. The queen, mercifully, had fled to Wales, and was not present to protest.

If there had been any great gusto for York’s plan before he announced it in parliament, then enthusiasm was extremely muted thereafter. Nobles and commons alike were immediately struck by the sheer, awful reality of deposing a king. York was asked to submit his claim to the crown, which he did on 16 October via the chancellor, his nephew George Neville, bishop
of Exeter. Neville presented to the parliament a large genealogical roll, detailing York’s descent from Henry III via Edward III, and describing how the Mortimer and York lines had intertwined to produce him, ‘Richard Plantaginet, commonly called duc of York’.
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This, went York’s argument, gave him dynastic precedence over Henry VI, who was descended from his
great-grandfather
Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt. Gaunt’s son Henry IV had therefore acted ‘unrightwisely’ (i.e. unlawfully) in seizing the crown in 1399, and ‘the right, title, dignity royal and estate of the crowns of the realms of England and of France, and of the lordship and land of Ireland, of right, law and custom appertaineth and belongeth’ to Richard duke of York.

It fell to parliament to debate the matter. But what was it that they were really debating? The dynastic case was there to be made, for if one accepted that the right to the crown could run through the female line (as York did when he trumpeted his Mortimer ancestry) then the duke had the better claim in blood. And yet it was clear that the claim in blood was only a mode of addressing a deeper argument. Had York really acted out of the conviction that his cause was purely one of dynastic right and wrong, he should surely have staked his claim at some previous point in the two decades. He had not. The English dynastic argument in 1460 was as much a veil for a practical argument about effective kingship as English claims to the crown of France had been during the 1420s. It was not the real reason that York claimed the throne: his real purpose encompassed a broad sense that Henry VI’s incompetence, allied with Queen Margaret’s tyrannical instincts, could be tolerated no longer, bound up with a heavy-handed sense of self-importance. All the duke’s previous efforts to amend and correct royal government had failed. Dynasty was the last resort. Now it was up to parliament to say whether they would accept this.

Following two weeks of debate a compromise was decided.
Given the hideous breach that was suggested by the prospect of a full deposition, a Troyes-like settlement was thrashed out.
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First, the acts of the 1459 ‘Parliament of Devils’ were rescinded. Then, on the matter of the succession, it was agreed that the king would enjoy the crown for the rest of his natural life, but the duke would be ‘entitled, called and reputed from henceforth, very and rightful heir to the crowns, royal estate, dignity and lordship’. Young Prince Edward was thus abruptly replaced in the royal line first by York and then by his sons, March and Rutland. The agreement was publicised on 31 October 1460 and bolstered by the astonishingly efficient Yorkist propaganda machine, which had in the summer been energetically spreading rumours – quite false – that Prince Edward was illegitimate and thus in every way ‘not the king’s son’.
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The cosmos, it seemed, now pointed towards York. Indeed, while the commons were debating in the refectory of Westminster Abbey, ‘treating upon the title of the said Duke of York, suddenly fell down the crown which hung in [the] midst of the said house … which was taken for a profige or token that the reign of King Henry was ended’.
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But it would not be that simple. For even if the supine king was prepared to yield his title to a belligerent cousin, there remained one person who would never accept the derogation of their family’s royal status. Queen Margaret was still at large.

As Christmas approached in 1460, the queen and her supporters found themselves scattered to the corners of the realm. At the end of November, while York sought to destroy her family’s future at Westminster, Margaret was encamped at Harlech Castle with her brother-in-law Jasper earl of Pembroke. The countryside was fraught with danger, and counterfeit letters reached her regularly, ‘forged things’ in King Henry’s hand, begging her to bring Prince
Edward south. They were delivered without any sign of the secret code Margaret had arranged for Henry to add to his letters if he were captured, so the queen gave them ‘no credence’. All the same, the Yorkists would soon be coming for her and her son, realising that she would remain the focus of opposition. To use the pithy phrase of one chronicler, it was clear to the whole kingdom that ‘she was more wittier than the king’.
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Employing that wit to good effect, Margaret decided to risk the freezing western seas in order to escape from Wales. On a cold day in late November she took Prince Edward by ship to Scotland. They arrived in the northern kingdom around 3 December, and went to stay at the haunting, gothic collegiate church of Lincluden, which stood on a bend in the river Nith, just outside Dumfries. They stayed under the protection of Mary of Guelders, widow of the recently deceased King James II of Scotland and regent to the
nine-year-old
King James III. The two women found that they had much in common.

Soon after Margaret reached Lincluden, she learned that her ally Henry earl of Northumberland was raising an army in the north of England, riding through their enemies’ estates with sword and fire, raising what hell they could, while spreading rumours about the duke of York and attempting to stir the common people to rebellion. This, Margaret realised, could be the basis of a force to strike back against the usurpers. From Scotland she managed to contact Henry duke of Somerset, Thomas earl of Devon and their capable military supporter Alexander Hody, a veteran soldier of the west country. All were based hundreds of miles south, but she instructed them to find their way by whatever means they could to Hull to muster for the counter-attack. Their party included Andrew Trollope, the treacherous Calais captain whose defection from the Yorkist side had resulted in the rout of Ludford Bridge. The queen wrote in Prince Edward’s name to the city of London, denouncing York as a ‘horrible and falsely
forsworn traitor … mortal enemy to my lord, to my lady and to us’ with an ‘untrue pretensed claim’ to the crown, and asking for the citizens’ aid to free King Henry from the duke’s malicious grasp.
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To put together any sort of army in the grip of winter, much less move it across a dozen counties along wet and freezing mud tracks, was ambitious to the point of desperation. So when news of Northumberland’s mobilisation reached York’s circle in London, they were taken quite by surprise. The prospect of losing control of government for a third time was enough to spur York urgently to arms. As soon as details of Margaret’s movements were known, York and Salisbury set out from the south-east to put down the insurgency and ‘bring in the Queen’.
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Edward earl of March went to Wales to face down an army rampaging there under Jasper Tudor.

By 21 December York had reached Sandal Castle, near Wakefield in west Yorkshire: a large stone fortress with turreted curtain walls encircling a fearsome keep on top of a motte overlooking the Calder valley. As a result of the weather and the speed at which they had set off to defend the north, York and Salisbury were sorely outmanned by the rapidly assembled partisans of the queen. York and his supporters spent a meagre Christmas inside Sandal Castle, with supplies thin and their enemies overrunning the adjoining lands, some camped outside the walls, and others raiding from their base in the nearby castle of Pontefract.

On 30 December a foraging party was attacked by Somerset and Devon’s men, and York decided to strike back. Why he did so is unclear. Possibly he was drawn out by a ruse concocted by his erstwhile captain Andrew Trollope, or else he believed a Christmas truce to be in place. He may have been given to believe that he had eight thousand men arriving, mustered by John, Lord Neville, an elder step-brother of Salisbury – although this Lord Neville had hitherto been a staunch supporter of the queen’s
party, and was an unlikely turncoat. Whatever his reasons, York rode out of Sandal seemingly believing that he would be able to push back the substantial forces of his enemies. He was not. He was barely out of the castle when soldiers bore down on him from four sides: Somerset, Northumberland and Neville attacked him head on, Exeter and Lord Roos closed in from either flank, and Lord Clifford closed the trap, preventing a retreat back into the castle. York was outnumbered perhaps five to one by men who not only opposed his political ambition but for the most part genuinely loathed him. As a much later writer would describe it, he was ‘environed on every side like a fish in a net or a deer in a buckstall’.
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After an hour of heavy fighting the duke was overcome. Seeing the situation becoming impossible, he sent his son Rutland to flee. Rutland ran for Wakefield Bridge, the proud, nine-arched stone crossing of the river Calder. On the far side stood the chantry chapel of St Mary the Virgin: the seventeen-year-old earl may have hoped to throw himself inside and seek sanctuary. But he fell agonisingly short. Lord Clifford had chased him from the battlefield, and caught up with him on or near the bridge. He was surrounded. Clifford stepped forward, cursed the young man and told him to prepare for his death, ‘as your father slew mine’. Then, as pleas for Rutland’s life rang out from all around – including, it was later claimed, from the boy’s tutor and chaplain Robert Aspall, who stood by his side – Clifford drew his dagger and thrust it through his heart.
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The blood debt of St Albans had been paid: truly, the son had suffered for the sins of the father.

The father, however, was faring little better. Hemmed in on all sides, York was trying to fight his way back to the castle. But it was too late. He was seized in the scramble of battle – Sir James Luttrell of Devonshire was later named as his captor – and dragged away. His helmet was removed, and a rough paper crown placed on his head. Then Richard duke of York, the man who would
have been many things, including a king, was paraded in front of the contemptuous soldiers of his foes and beheaded.

Many more Yorkists died on the battlefield that day. Besides York and Rutland, Salisbury’s son Sir Thomas Neville was also taken and killed. Salisbury himself had escaped from Sandal Castle and was attempting to flee northwards. But he made it little further than Rutland. During the night, the sixty-year-old earl was captured and brought back to enemy headquarters at Pontefract Castle. The next day he was taken out and executed in public. Soon after the heads of the four dead Yorkists were sent to the city of York to be displayed upon the Micklegate. There the duke of York’s dead eyes stared down at the passing citizens, his paper crown still jammed down on his bloodied forehead.