The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (22 page)

Years of fractious politics and growing personal enmity had come to this. ‘Acts of vengeance have been perpetrated on both sides,’ wrote the papal legate and Yorkist supporter Bishop Coppini to one of his associates who was camped with the queen.
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Margaret, Prince Edward and their allies had finally vanquished their greatest opponent. But the king remained in the hands of Warwick and Edward earl of March.

The realm was now truly split: the queen’s party now as much of a faction as the Yorkists. (From this point we can properly refer to the former as ‘Lancastrians’ after the duchy of Lancaster – King Henry’s private duchy, which had belonged to kings of England since the reign of his grandfather Henry IV. The duchy of Lancaster was the source of Henry’s private power, rather than his public authority, which had finally evaporated.) Neither side seemed strong enough to defeat the other. And while Rutland’s death at the battle of Wakefield had settled the score with Clifford, the rest of the slaughter only served to intensify the blood feud that now dragged England’s magnates towards each other, armed, dangerous and desperate: whirling in a vicious dance of death.

Clement Paston, a student in London of around nineteen years old, wrote to his brother John in a state of some anxiety. Clement was a bright and level-headed young man, who had studied at Cambridge before going down to the city in the late 1450s for a professional education. He had grown up in turbulent times, and his East Anglian family’s fortunes had risen and fallen according to the ebb and flow of national politics and the success or failure of their patrons near the royal court. Even at a relatively young age he was used to seeing Fortune’s wheel turn, but on 23 January 1461, when Clement sat down to dash off a communiqué to his relatives in the countryside, he admitted to his brother that he was writing ‘in haste’ and ‘not well at ease’.
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Even by the standards of tumult that had become customary on the streets of London over the previous decade, the winter of 1460–1 was a disturbed and dangerous time. York’s defeat at Wakefield was now well known around England. But the fact of his demise had done nothing to calm the realm. In the west, his wrathful son Edward – eighteen years old but by now a strapping man of six foot four with a warrior’s temperament – was leading an army against Henry VI’s half-brother Jasper Tudor. The earl of Warwick, meanwhile, still held Henry prisoner, preventing any theoretical return to ‘ordinary’ royal government. And most troublingly of all, Queen Margaret was loose in the north, buoyed by her allies’ victory in the field and said to be travelling south to take both vengeance and the capital. Rumours were flying around on the ‘common voice’ and Clement Paston reported a few that had reached his ears: he told of knights of the family’s
acquaintance who were ‘taken or else dead’, he described London’s apparent preference for the Yorkists over the queen, and he relayed the fear that French and Scottish mercenaries and the northern lords’ English retainers who made up a large part of the queen’s army were being permitted to ‘rob and steal’ in the towns through which they passed – a fate no Londoner wished to share. Clement advised his elder brother to muster forces – ‘footmen and horsemen’ – in East Anglia and be ready to join battle at any moment, making sure that the men raised were presented in clean and orderly fashion, for the sake of the family honour. ‘God have [you] in His keeping’, the young man signed off, and this was more than the conventional pleasantry of correspondence.

England was in a state of civil war. The battles that had been fought since 1455 were sporadic, occasional outbursts of violence. But now armies were in the field throughout England and Wales, employing foreign mercenaries, trained noble retainers and haphazardly conscripted lords’ tenants alike. On 2 February 1461 Edward’s army clashed with that of Jasper Tudor, Owen Tudor and James Butler, earl of Wiltshire at Mortimer’s Cross, near Wigmore Castle in the Welsh marches, where the road passed between London and Aberystwyth. It was a day that would burnish the eighteen-year-old Edward’s reputation and his legend like no other. The ‘Rose of Rouen’ – as he was nicknamed by Yorkist partisans – was joined in command by several stalwarts of his late father’s Welsh lands, including Sir Walter Devereux and the Herbert brothers, Sir William and Richard Herbert of Raglan. Their enemies were formidably reinforced, for Wiltshire had brought over large contingents of Breton and French mercenaries, as well as his own retainers from his Irish estates. But they had marched at pace across Wales from Pembroke and arrived at the battlefield weary. And in Edward they came up against a commander who was learning how to inspire men with an almost devout fervour.

On the morning of the battle, the winter sky was filled with a blinding and baffling sight: three suns rising together over the horizon, which then combined to form a single blazing beacon in the sky.
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Edward read this as a divine portent predicting his victory, and his forces tore into the Wiltshire–Tudor army, routing them in relatively short order. Jasper Tudor and the earl of Wiltshire escaped the battlefield, but Owen Tudor, now about sixty years old, was captured, along with Sir John Throckmorton and seven other Lancastrian commanders. They were taken to the nearby town of Hereford, where a chopping block had been erected in the marketplace. According to one contemporary account, Owen Tudor expected his enemies to show him some leniency, although this would have been extraordinarily naïve less than six weeks after the horrible butchery that had followed the battle of Wakefield. Any remaining confidence drained from him when ‘he saw the axe and the block’. Stripped to his red velvet doublet, the old man stood before the assembled townsmen of Hereford and begged ‘pardon and grace’. Then the collar of his doublet was rudely torn away and he was led towards the headsman.

One chronicler wrote that Owen Tudor’s last words recalled his wife, the princess of France and queen of England who had seen fit to marry this humble Welshman and bear his children. ‘That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap,’ he said. Then he put ‘his heart and mind wholly unto God, and full meekly took his death’.
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Owen Tudor’s bloodied head was set upon the highest point of the market cross. Some time later a woman, possibly Owen’s mistress and the mother of his infant bastard David Owen, was seen washing the blood from the mangled head, combing its hair and setting more than one hundred candles around it. The crowd, if they took any notice, assumed she was insane.
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The Yorkist triumph at Mortimer’s Cross barely lasted as long
as the glow of the three suns that had preceded it. Jasper Tudor and Wiltshire fled, eventually to take refuge in Scotland. But theirs had not been the only Lancastrian army on the march. As Edward regrouped at Hereford, Queen Margaret was mustering her other allies, including the dukes of Somerset and Exeter, the earls of Northumberland and Shrewsbury, a large host of northern lords and the ubiquitous Calais turncoat Andrew Trollope. By 10 February this violent army of hardened northerners and foreign sell-swords had burned and looted its way as far as Cambridgeshire. By 16 February they had broken the defences of Dunstable, in Bedfordshire. London was close at hand and Warwick, in charge both of King Henry VI and the government of England, was forced to act. Earlier in the year the earl had written to Pope Pius II, telling him, ‘Your Holiness must not be troubled if you have heard of the events in England and of the destruction of some of my kinsmen in the battle against our enemies. With the help of God and the king, who is excellently disposed, all will end well.’
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Now his faith and confidence were to be tested.

Warwick took a large army out of London, aided by John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, William FitzAlan, earl of Arundel and a clutch of his own peers, including his brother John Neville, his uncle Lord Fauconberg and the treasurer, Lord Bonville. They left Londoners in a state of deep trepidation. Another battle was fully expected, in which, as one correspondent put it, ‘great shedding of blood cannot be avoided, and whoever conquers, the Crown of England loses, which is a very great pity’.
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For the second time in less than six years, the two forces met at the city of St Albans. But whereas in 1455 skirmishing and street fighting had taken place, on Shrove Tuesday, 17 February 1461 it was all-out war. Thousands of men descended on either side: the Milanese ambassador in France would hear stories of the queen
and Somerset commanding thirty thousand men each.
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This was a wild exaggeration, but what is not in doubt is the fear that these huge forces struck into the hearts of the ordinary people of St Albans. The abbot, John Whethamstede, wrote in his official register of the savagery, profanity and appetite for destruction among the northerners, who in his view seemed to consider any incursion south of the Trent as a divinely sanctioned opportunity to plunder and steal.
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In truth, the northern army was much more than a rabble with pillage on their minds. As they had shown at Wakefield, they were commanded with discipline and cunning; they also marched under one identity, with every man wearing the badge of Edward, prince of Wales, a red-and-black band with ostrich feathers. Warwick’s men were blindsided by enemy troops pouring into St Albans at around 1 p.m. from the north-west, rather than the north-east, and after heavy fighting the Yorkist vanguard was scattered, fleeing in every direction as the hoofs of the Lancastrian cavalry thundered after them. Abbot Whethamstede wrote of men being rounded up and run through with lances by their vengeful enemies, until finally, around 6 p.m., the darkness of the winter evening had fully fallen, and pursuit was no longer possible.
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As their men scampered for safety, Warwick and most of his fellow commanders and captains also melted away, until only one man of any noble dignity was left on the field.

King Henry VI sat under a tree, laughing and singing as the battle raged about him. The king’s guards, Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell, were taken prisoner and summarily executed on the orders of the queen, who allowed the eight-year-old prince to pronounce the sentences upon them. Henry, meanwhile, was reunited with his family, once more changing hands like a rag doll. Abbot Whethamstede met the king in the abbey and begged him to issue a proclamation against plundering. As ever, Henry VI did what he was told. His own army ignored him
and Whethamstede’s beloved city of St Albans fell to rape and robbery, as though, said the abbot, it had been invaded by rabid animals.
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As fortune swung violently back and forth between the two parties, England was plunged into a desperate mood of self-preservation. After St Albans, the queen decided to push on to London. The city, however, decided to make a stand against her. Ahead of her arrival Margaret sent requests for food and refreshment to London, which were answered nervously but favourably by the mayor. But as carts laden with supplies were being dragged through the city, towards the Cripplegate and the road leading north, a group of citizens came into the streets to block their path. ‘The commones of the Cite took the vitailles from the Carters and would not suffer it to pass,’ wrote a chronicler. They insisted that the city’s governers send a delegation to tell the queen that she could not enter London while the feared ‘Northern men’ remained in her party. The rumour which Clement Paston had reported to his brother had clearly taken hold: everyone now believed that if the Lancastrian army were allowed within the city walls, then London, like St Albans, would be ‘robbed and despoiled’.
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Margaret had little choice but to take her husband and son once more back north. The move – and London’s communal decision that it was safer to hold with the defeated Yorkists than the victorious queen – would prove fatal.

Warwick’s escape from St Albans allowed him to reunite with Edward earl of March. At the end of the month they gathered their forces together in the Cotswolds. There they took a bold decision. Warwick had lost command of Henry’s person, and without him they lacked a totem for their legitimacy. But under the act of accord that had been passed between Henry and the late Richard duke of York, March was now heir to the crown.
And since forces loyal to Henry VI had killed York at the battle of Wakefield, March could argue that he was justified in regarding the act of accord to have been broken. He no longer had to wait for Henry’s death to claim the crown that the Yorkists argued was theirs by blood. He was completely justified in seizing it.

This, at any rate, was the theory. On Thursday 26 February the earl of March rode into London, accompanied by Warwick and their noble allies.
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The city was in the early days of Lent, but if the (somewhat biased) chroniclers are to be believed, there was great cheer at his coming. Rhymes and ditties celebrated his arrival, one of which hailed him with the image of the white rose of York – one of several badges and symbols that belonged to the family: ‘Let us walk in a new wineyard, and let us make us a gay garden in the month of March with this fair white rose and herb, the Earl of March.’
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On Sunday 1 March Warwick’s brother George Neville, bishop of Exeter and chancellor of England, gave a speech in St John’s Fields, just outside the city walls, which was heard by thousands of soldiers and citizens. Neville detailed the case against Henry VI and asked whether the crowd wished him to remain as king. According to one chronicler, ‘The people cried, “Nay! Nay!” And then they asked, if they would have the earl of March to be their king; and they seid, “Ye! Ye!”’
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On Monday morning London was plastered with bills detailing Edward’s claim, and the next day, Tuesday 3 March, Edward held a council meeting at his family’s London residence, Baynard’s Castle, where a handful of bishops and lords gave their assent to his claim. On 4 March, the Te Deum was sung at St Paul’s, Bishop Neville preached a political sermon at the cross outside and Edward rode out of the city in procession down to the palace of Westminster. There, in the court of chancery, which was the place traditionally associated with a king’s exercise of legal equity, and therefore the ultimate manifestation of the royal will in action, ‘he was Sworn afore the
bishop of Canterbury and the Chancellor of England and the lords that he should truly and justly keep the realm and the laws thereof maintain as a true and a just king’.
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He put on the robes and cap of state – although not the crown, for a coronation was not to be held for some time. Then Edward sat ceremonially on the King’s Bench – the marble chair in one of the two highest common law courts in the land, which symbolised the personal authority of the king as judge. Finally, he went to Westminster Abbey church to make an offering at the shrine of his namesake St Edward the Confessor. He was yet to be anointed and crowned. But in the eyes of his supporters he was now King Edward IV, ‘the true inheritor of the crowns of England and France and the lordship of Ireland’.
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