The War of the Roses (28 page)

The invaders, however, had the advantage of speed, as the Swabian/ Swiss mercenaries and presumably most of the few local landed gentry recruits had horses and the Irish infantry were used to long-distance ‘jogging' in attendance to their lords' campaigns at home. They could thus maintain momentum towards the waiting royal army, and had the better of three days of clashes with a smaller waiting royal force under Lord Scales south of Doncaster on 12–14 June. The latter were probably only meant to delay their advance and give the King time to choose his battlefield and receive reinforcements. As they retreated through Sherwood Forest they left the road to the River Trent open, and later on 14 June Lincoln's army crossed the unguarded river at Fiskerton to camp for the night near the village of East Stoke.
⁴¹
In the meantime, Henry and the royal army had left Kenilworth on news of the rebel landing to march north-east via Leicester and Loughborough, but surprisingly got lost en route to Nottingham in woods on 12 June. On the 14th they arrived in Nottingham to join up with 6000 reinforcements sent by Henry's stepfather, the Earl of Derby (the crucial Ricardian defector at Bosworth), commanded by his son Lord Strange (who Richard had threatened to execute before Bosworth).
⁴²
The royal army then marched along the ridge beside the Trent to face the rebels outside Stoke the following day. According to the 1548 chronicler Hall the King was aware of all that the rebels were doing and intended to do via his spies,
⁴³
and thus knew how large and (in)experienced an army he faced.

 

The Battle of Stoke: a close-run thing?

The resultant Battle of Stoke has been reassessed as the real last armed encounter of the ‘Wars of the Roses', as mentioned earlier, and had similarities to Bosworth. But little is known of precise events, or of the exact size of the armies. The King had around 12,000 men, the main contingents being from the Earl of Oxford, his commander-in-chief at Bosworth and a veteran of Barnet (where he had defeated the opposing section of Edward IV's army); Derby; the Earls of Shrewsbury and Devon; and his uncle the Duke of Bedford with his Welshmen. All were reliable, with Derby the only well-known ‘turncoat' and unlikely to desert his own son-in-law; no repeat of Bosworth was thus likely. Lincoln had around 9000 men, and relied heavily on the 2000 experienced and well-armed Continentals; by past precedent the Irish would have been badly-armed and without much protective clothing, enthusiastic in the charge but very vulnerable to the better-armed English knights and tenantry. Henry sent Oxford and the vanguard–around 6000 men–ahead of him towards the foe while he hung back, evidently keen to avoid being exposed to a charge of the enemy cavalry intent on winning the battle by killing him as seen at Bosworth. Thus Lincoln could not repeat his uncle Richard's tactic at Bosworth, and had to carve his way through Oxford's compact body of well-armed troops first. Apparently, Henry's main army had not yet formed up when Lincoln launched a headlong attack on Oxford's vanguard, hoping to use the disciplined German/ Swiss pikemen with their famous long javelins plus the ferocious Irishmen to smash through the enemy line. This combined the ‘phalanx' tactic of a compact, bristling ‘hedgehog' square of infantry, which enemy cavalry could not penetrate and less-well-trained infantry could not push back, with the ‘Highland' charge. The ‘phalanx' tactic had worked well for the Swiss when facing the Burgundian feudal cavalry in 1477, smashing Duke Charles' army and leaving their general dead, and was to achieve further victories into the sixteenth century–but did Lincoln have enough men?

In the event, the Yorkist charge unnerved part of the royal vanguard who fled, but most held firm and Oxford was able to use his archers to wreak havoc on the poorly-protected Irish. As seen at Barnet and Bosworth, Oxford had plenty of experience in handling a determined attack by a large body of men. Nevertheless, it took around two hours for the royal army to prevail over the determined enemy assault, and as the Irish casualty rate soared the Germans/ Swiss lost heart too. Finally, after around three hours the Irish broke, the Continentals followed them, and the rebel army began running back down the ridge towards the River Trent to get away from the pursuit. A substantial body was caught and massacred in a narrow lane (duly named the ‘Red Gutter') en route, and many more were drowned in the river or picked off as they tried to swim across. Around 4000, that is up to half the Yorkist force, were killed–including almost all their leadership such as Lincoln, Schwartz, Kildare's brother Sir Thomas Fitzgerald of Lackagh, and Sir Robert Percy.
⁴⁴
Hastings was pardoned, the two Lords Scrope were arrested and imprisoned but released after paying fines, and Broughton escaped to Scotland.
⁴⁵

Lovell was last seen trying to swim his horse across the Trent, and his complete disappearance led to him entering legend; he was supposed to have fled into hiding at his house in Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire, and two centuries later a body was allegedly found in a sealed-up room there. Did he accidentally become shut in his subterranean hideout and starve to death? Romantic writers and the novelist John Buchan (in
The Blanket of the Dark
) made the most of the lurid Gothic tale, but it is unproven.
⁴⁶
More prosaically, Lovell was granted a permit to enter Scotland as a refugee in 1488,
⁴⁷
though apparently he never took it up so it is likely that he was known to be alive months after the battle and then failed to make it to Scotland as originally planned. Symonds and the pretender were taken alive; as the meddling priest had ‘benefit of clergy' he could not be executed but was imprisoned for life. As recorded by Polydore Vergil, Henry used a sense of humour and mild contempt in employing the captured but harmless Simnel as a turnspit in the royal kitchens and twenty years later he was still in his service as a falconer.
⁴⁸
Apparently, a few years later when Henry was entertaining some of the pardoned Irish lords who had backed Simnel he called on their ex-king to serve them wine and told them that they would be crowning apes next.
⁴⁹
More to the point, Kildare was so powerful in Dublin and Henry so short of resources that he had to be pardoned when a–small –royal army under Sir Richard Edgcumbe arrived in Ireland in summer 1488.
⁵⁰
He held onto his post as Lord Lieutenant for several more years, his pro-Lancastrian rival the Earl of Desmond not having adequate armed tenants or allied lords to be risked as his replacement. The bishops who had backed Simnel were, however, excommunicated by the Pope at Henry's request.
⁵¹

 

And had Henry lost the battle of Stoke…?

Lincoln's tactics at Stoke failed, as much due to the experienced nature of the opposing commander–Oxford–as to his lack of numbers. He had had a larger army than the previous insurgent to take on a king on the battlefield, Henry, had had, and unlike him had been a veteran of at least one major battle (Bosworth). However, the crucial facts were that Oxford's disciplined vanguard failed to break either in the first impetus of Lincoln's attack–though some of it did flee–or during the next two hours of close combat. Had the vanguard broken in the first impetus of the enemy's charge it would probably have doomed Henry's army, as the rest of his troops were not yet ready to engage and panic would have been infectious. The cautious Henry was not the sort of general to try to reverse a losing battle by charging into the enemy leadership as Richard III had done; nor did he have the experience to keep his nerve as one ‘wing' fled as Edward IV and Richard had done at Barnet. It is unlikely that his senior commanders would have defected to Lincoln in order to save their skins, or that they were deliberately hanging back from engaging, as some historians have suggested
⁵²
–men such as Jasper Tudor, Derby, and the Earl of Devon could expect no mercy from their long-time foes in the Yorkist ranks. There is a difficulty over the fact that Henry did not order the rest of his army to back Oxford up and/or to advance around the flanks and take Lincoln in the rear, but left Oxford to fight on alone;
⁵³
did he fear desertions or did Oxford assure that he could handle the attack himself? Also, the full strength of the royal army at around 12,000 was far from the potential total of troops that all senior royal ‘tenants-in-chief' within reach of Kenilworth as of early June 1487 could provide. Many senior peers did not join the royal army, either while waiting at Kenilworth in May or after the rebel landing on 4 June–although Lincoln advanced so fast that some who were summoned may have been unable to reach Henry in time. The question arises–did Henry not summon his full strength for fear of defections as Richard had suffered in 1485? Did he prefer to rely on a few trustable vassals than a large, unwieldy and potentially treacherous gathering?

If Henry relied on a smaller army than he could have summoned in order to be sure of its loyalty, the tactic nearly ended in disaster. If the entire vanguard had fled at the first attack by the Continentals and Irish, Henry does not seem to have had the rest of his army drawn up and would probably have had to retreat. The royal army could have disintegrated as it was perceived to be losing, and the loyal Jasper Tudor, Derby, and Devon had retained too small a body of experienced tenants to withstand the advancing Yorkists. It is extremely unlikely, however, that Henry would have got himself killed in a heroic last stand–he was too cautious a man for that and was apparently about a mile behind Oxford's vanguard as the enemy attacked them, giving him time to withdraw if necessary. As in 1471 after Tewkesbury, he would have been likely to flee abroad–again, with Jasper Tudor as his principal supporter. The probability is that Margaret Beaufort would have seen to it that Queen Elizabeth was forcibly evacuated to friendly France with Prince Arthur, rather than risking her joining up with ex-partisans of her late father and uncle to be divorced and then remarried to a Yorkist king. As the Yorkist heiress, Elizabeth was a valuable prize and was more likely to have been married off to Lincoln (two years her senior) than to Warwick (nine years her junior). No doubt Elizabeth Woodville would have changed sides again to return to her Yorkist allegiance, and if the Queen had left for France it is possible that the latter's next sister, Cecily, would have been chosen as replacement ‘prize' and Yorkist heiress to be married off to either Lincoln or Warwick.

The question cannot be answered definitively as to whether Lincoln would have allowed the ‘crowned King Edward', i.e. Warwick (real or fake?) to assume the throne of England or reclaimed it for himself as ‘John II'. He was adult, aged around twenty-three, and the coronation of ‘Warwick' (i.e. Simnel) in Dublin would not have been definitive for the latter's claim as his Irish partisans had less politico-military weight than the German/ Swiss ‘landsknechts' and the English Yorkist gentry. If Henry VII had fled the country and both Lincoln and Lovell had agreed that Lincoln should be king, the Irish peers present in the Yorkist camp–who did not include Kildare himself–would have had to accept it, however unwillingly. If Henry's partisans in London had murdered the genuine Warwick to deny him to the victors, a Machiavellian tactic that men like Sir Reginald Bray (or even Archbishop Morton?) were capable of, the fake ‘Warwick' would have had a problem if Lincoln and Lovell, knowing that he was not genuine, had pointed out that he could easily be exposed and ruined. If the real Warwick had been released as the captive Henry VI had been released by Archbishop Neville as his rival fled in 1470, then probably he would have been substituted for Simnel by the victors. Could some ex-Yorkist senior Churchman such as Bishop Alcock, recently Chancellor and formerly Edward V's tutor, be relied upon to persuade the panicking Henrican Council to release Warwick so as to obtain the advancing rebels' gratitude and pardon if Henry had already fled the country–or would Morton have insisted on carrying off Warwick into exile as a hostage?

‘King Edward VI', i.e. the real or possibly fake Warwick, would have been twelve in 1487 and so needed a ‘governor' (personal guardian) or even a ‘Protector'–if memories of Richard III's behaviour had not doomed that office for a few decades. The senior royal male kinsman available was the usual choice for this role, and so it would have gone to Lincoln. Archbishop Morton would have been sacked as Chancellor as he was so closely tied to the Lancastrian cause on account of his activities in 1483–7, despite his loyalty to Edward IV in 1471–83. Possibly a move would have been made to confiscate his archbishopric too, and either Alcock or Bishop John Russell would have been the probable new Chancellor. Rotherham, now in his late sixties and already superseded as Chancellor so possibly declining in capability, would have remained Archbishop of York. If Warwick had been on the throne the role of principal female ‘power-broker' would have gone to Elizabeth Woodville–an irony if she had been responsible for having his father, Clarence, killed. She may have regained her role as ‘Queen Mother' if either Elizabeth or Cecily of York was married off to Lincoln or Warwick, and in any case would have regained all her property, which Henry had recently confiscated. If Lincoln was king, he was less likely than Warwick to have been amenable to her advice and power-broking activities.

All the acts of attainder passed on Richard III's partisans after Bosworth would have been overturned, though some Henricans who were politically invaluable such as the Earl of Northumberland (not present at Stoke) would have been likely to retain all their lands and posts. Lord Derby, as Richard's betrayer at Bosworth and the husband of the ex-King's mother, would have been the main ‘loser' and if not killed at Stoke would have had to flee the country; his brother Sir William Stanley, as Henry's Lord Chamberlain and another Bosworth defector, would have faced similar Yorkist enmity. (As events turned out, he was not entirely lost to the Yorkist cause and apparently offered support to ‘Perkin Warbeck' a few years later.) Lacking senior Yorkist peers, Lincoln or Warwick would have probably called on the son of Richard's late commander-in-chief, the Duke of Norfolk–Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (b. 1443), a veteran of Barnet and Bosworth and put in the Tower by Henry in 1487. In real life Henry only slowly restored some of the extensive Norfolk (ex-Mowbray) lands given to him by Richard; he became Lord Treasurer in 1501, and the Dukedom was finally restored by Henry VIII after he had won the battle of Flodden in 1513. He could have expected a quicker restoration to favour from a new Yorkist regime–and his son Thomas, given Edward IV's younger daughter Anne by Henry VII, could still have expected this sort of prestigious match. Lincoln would have brought his father's de la Pole Suffolk lands into the royal fisc if he was king when the latter died (in real life, in 1491). The Tudor-confiscated lands of the Dukedoms of York and Gloucester would have been the King's, plus the Dukedom of Lancaster and Margaret Beaufort's lands–and would York have gone to his next brother Edmund? The question of whether Warwick was mentally sub-normal and thus would have been as much of a ‘figurehead' as King ‘Edward VI' as Henry VI was in the 1450s cannot be answered, given that his naivety and ignorance as a Tower prisoner in the 1499 plot to free him was possibly due to his being kept incommunicado for so long.
⁵⁴
Being kept away from political activities or the senior court figures for many years as a hostage had also been the fate of Henry VII in 1471–83, without effect on his political skills once he had had opportunities to learn and to take action.