The War of the Roses (6 page)

The drama of York's killing in December 1460 added to the notion of the political conflict over patronage and the succession as a ‘blood-feud', with elements of treachery that the Yorkists could play up. Fighting during the Church's Christmas festivities was unusual, and implicitly not chivalrous. York had gone to his south Yorkshire residence, Sandal Castle, to raise troops against the gathering court/Percy army based at nearby Pontefract, but had not taken the offensive; instead, the enemy advanced by surprise to blockade him and cut off his supplies. A sortie into Wakefield to gather supplies was then ambushed in dubious circumstances and the Yorkist leadership ‘targeted' for killing. In fact, contrary to Shakespeare's story, Margaret was not present at the battle or the executions, though she exulted in them afterwards; the surprise attack on York's force–possibly at a time of truce–was led by the Dukes of Exeter (who had a distant claim to the throne himself) and Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford. The last three, sons of the principal lords killed at St Albans in 1455, had old scores to settle. Nor was York's 17-year-old son Edmund of Rutland a youthful non-combatant, whose killing was seen as unprecedentedly shocking;
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he was old enough to fight and be killed by contemporary reckoning. (Henry V had played a leading role at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 aged 16.) But the killings left York's heir Edward at large in the Welsh Marches, where he had been raising troops, and the local court force under the Earl of Wiltshire and Jasper Tudor (Henry VI's half-brother) was unable to complete the Queen's victory by killing Edward. Instead, the latter took the offensive and destroyed the ‘Lancastrians' at Mortimer's Cross on 2 or 3 February before marching on London to link up with the Earl of Warwick.
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After the battle he executed the King's stepfather, Owen Tudor, whose grandson Henry VII was to kill his brother Richard in 1485; the blood-feud escalated.

Henry's eventual deposition by Edward (3 March 1461) was not carried out with the confirmation of most of the political ‘nation' as had been the agreement of October 1460. There was no formal meeting of the Lords, though the unsettled state of the war-torn country and the need for speedy action after Edward's arrival in London on 26 February made that impossible anyway. The only major magnates involved in the ‘Great Council' at Baynard's Castle, the York residence in the city, that backed Edward were Warwick and the (Mowbray) Duke of Norfolk; the churchmen were led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Exeter. The latter, Warwick's brother George Neville, was also Lord Chancellor, in which capacity he had set out Edward's genealogical claim and the misrule by Henry to a public meeting at St George's Fields on 1 March.
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The seizure of power was unrecognized in the northern counties occupied by the Queen's forces.

The accession of Edward IV was at least partly due to recent actions by Queen Margaret. Following Wakefield, the Queen advanced into the Midlands with her feared northerners, as recorded by the panicking Croyland chronicler, and took the usually competent Warwick by surprise at St Albans on 17 February. This time Trollope's Calais troops won the day for the Queen's party; Abbot Wheathampstead reckoned that the soft southerners in Warwick's army were terrified of the Percy/Scottish levies' élan and bloodthirstiness.
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Henry himself, rescued from the Yorkists by the Queen's faction at St Albans, passed from being a prisoner of Warwick to being a virtually powerless talisman of his wife's army. As York's son Edward destroyed the court army in the Marches at Mortimer's Cross and advanced to join up with Warwick the Queen retreated, possibly nervous of the damage to her reputation if London was sacked. Negotiations at Barnet to admit a token force of court lords and troops were unsuccessful. A deputation of leading figures pleading for her to leave the city unoccupied may have played a part, but in any case London was less important than defeating Edward's army.
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(In similar circumstances a decade later in March 1471, Edward took care to secure London even with his enemies rapidly closing in.) The responsibility for her failure to press on to London is unclear, but the decision lost her the south as she retreated to her strongholds in Yorkshire. Warwick, who had retreated to the Cotswolds, was left unmolested to join up with the advancing Edward's Marcher army somewhere around Burford in mid-February and then regain London.

The removal of Henry VI–and his son–to the north in March 1461 left a legal vacuum in government in London. Edward could not carry out the government in Henry's name (as his father had been forced to do after the Lords' rejection of his own claim to immediate usurpation in October 1460) as he did not have physical possession of him. The decision of Edward and his backers, led by Warwick, to depose Henry in his absence in March 1461 was partly a reply to the recent killing of York, his second son the Earl of Rutland, and his brother- in-law Salisbury (Warwick's father) at or after the battle of Wakefield. Placing the victims' heads on Micklegate Bar in York afterwards further embittered matters between the York-Neville faction and their enemies, though technically traitors' heads were legally liable to public display (as seen at London Bridge for centuries.) If the killings and posthumous humiliations of December 1460 were the act of a psychopath, it was Clifford not Margaret, contrary to later legend. York had already started the practice of killing captured foes in cold blood at St Albans in 1455; this was merely the expected retaliation. Had he been captured at Ludlow in October 1459, judicial murder would have been probable. But the blood-feud between the York dynasty and the Beauforts intensified with these killings, and served to justify Edward deposing Henry once he had destroyed the Lancastrian army in the Welsh Marches at Mortimer's Cross (February 1461) and raced to London ahead of the Queen's forces. Technically, the court party's breach of the truce at Wakefield could be presented as a reason for Edward to abandon his allegiance to his ‘faithless' King and Queen; the settlement of October 1460 had involved York paying allegiance to Henry but Edward had not done so.

Henry's rescue from Warwick's Yorkist army at St Albans ahead of Edward's arrival thus made his deposition by the Yorkist leadership in London easier, a contrast to the situation the previous October when York's similar claim had been blocked by his peers. Until the point when York claimed the throne all forced seizures of government had been subject to the fiction that they were in the King's name to save him from ‘evil advisers', as when York and his allies in the 1455 ‘revolt' had claimed that they were only seeking access to Henry's presence which their court foes were denying.
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The Queen, whose expected personal role as a fifteenth-century female did not encompass deputizing for a weak or preoccupied husband, could still have induced Henry to go at the head of an army–as he had done earlier to confront York and did in 1459–but was now regarded as partisan rather than in the traditional role of a queen as peacemaking conciliator. This was inevitable by 1456–8 given the rumoured threat of York to her husband's throne, however much rumours of her son's real parentage may have been current to add to her resentment. (The extent of this factor before 1460 is unclear.
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) But she was not the first queen to be regarded as a dangerous political partisan–Henry III' s Provencal Queen, Eleanor, whose relations had been monopolizing patronage along with his half-brothers in the 1240s and 1250s, was pelted with refuse by angry Londoners as she tried to sail under London Bridge in 1262 and the initially popular Queen Isabella, leader of the 1326 rebellion, was attacked for giving power to her lover Roger Mortimer and was supposed to have murdered her husband, Edward II. In both cases their political role was ended after the resolution of the conflicts in which they were leading figures, Eleanor by reason of age and eclipse by her son Edward I after 1265 and Isabella by forcible marginalization by her son Edward III in 1330. Both were French, like Margaret, so her origin was not to blame despite the recent humiliation of a complete French victory in Normandy. Margaret remained the leader of her cause in exile in 1461–70, and so continued to be vilified by the new regime.

As of autumn 1459 the Queen's and her factions' full intentions are unclear, with exile and confiscation for any captured Yorkist leaders as likely as a bloodbath in retaliation for St Albans. But the fleeing York's wife, Cecily Neville, prudently sent her youngest sons abroad. Even if York, his two elder sons, his brother-in-law Salisbury, and the latter's son Warwick had all been captured and judicially murdered by their foes Somerset, Buckingham, and Clifford in retaliation for the 1455 killings the younger sons of York and Salisbury would have survived to claim their fathers' lands in due course. The ascendancy of the Queen's faction could not have lasted indefinitely, and any mass-confiscation of Neville lands to benefit her Percy allies would have left embittered exiles at large ready to attack England at the first opportunity with the backing of the House of Burgundy, 1460s rivals of the Queen's French allies.

Had Henry not been in a state of mental incapacity after the shock of St Albans (his first exposure to combat) in 1455 York would not have had the same excuse to resume his Protectorship, though he could have kept Henry away from Westminster so that potential doubters did not know the royal condition and exaggerated the latter. A king normally lived in public, but after Henry slipped into some form of catatonic state he had been kept in seclusion at Clarendon near Salisbury from July to December 1453 without much controversy, with limited access by official delegations once he was thereafter installed closer to London at Windsor. If necessary, access to Henry could have been restricted again under pretence of renewed illness, though details of the truth would have duly leaked out. The fact that York was deprived of his Protectorship, probably with clear evidence of Henry's full recovery used in Parliament by his opponents and possibly at Henry's own insistence, within nine months of his victory in 1455 shows his limited grip on power. Even with the King incapacitated and York's principal enemies dead or powerless his faction could not maintain full power for him, and his continuation on the Council from February 1456 (apparently at the King's request and against the Queen's wishes) only led to his gradual eclipse by the ‘court party', led by Margaret and the Beauforts, over the next year or so. Clearly a ‘middle party' of peers (and the bishops?) were unwilling to see either of the two rival factions predominant in 1456–8 and neither could stage a coup to deprive the other of all offices and lands, while lack of clear direction in policy or judicial ‘police action' against local feuds increased private conflicts in the counties. But this stalemate could not last long term.

 

The struggles of 1450–61: some further points for consideration

 

(i) A third royal deposition in 133 years, autumn 1460/ March 1461–how legal was it?

In 1459–60 the struggle for control of the government led to naked military conflict, with York eventually victorious. As in spring 1455, the anti-York party at court (now led by Margaret) resorted to military confrontation; but this time they sought to move in on York's estates to pre-empt an attack on London. The first clash duly took place as royal troops intercepted Neville forces en route to aid York at Blore Heath, and the most was made of the King's presence with the army to make all who resisted seem to be traitors. Having escaped from the advancing royal army converging on his base, Ludlow Castle (centre of his Welsh Marches lands inherited from the Mortimers), York was able to take refuge in loyal Ireland–an ironic result of his court enemies sending him there out of their way in 1447. His eldest sons, Edward and Edmund, and his wife's nephew Warwick were able to secure control of Calais, with its largest and most coherent body of disciplined troops in the country, and returned to England to defeat the court party at Northampton. The important role of the Calais garrison in England's military conflicts in 1455–71 has been underestimated; and from 1455–70 they were under Warwick's control. Crucially, when Edward IV sacked and drove out Warwick in spring 1470 the Earl's deputy at Calais, Lord Wenlock, stayed loyal and refused Warwick entry so he had no choice but to seek aid from Louis XI and the exiled Queen Margaret (though Wenlock himself later defected to Margaret and died fighting for her at Tewkesbury in 1471).

For the moment the Yorkist dominance of 1455 was restored. But even then their victory in summer 1460 preserved enough support for the King among the peerage for York's claim to the throne in October to be blocked. His military triumph was achieved by Warwick, Salisbury, and his own heir Edward of March in invasion from Calais while he remained in Ireland; would he have risked an attack with ‘inferior' Irish troops on the court had Warwick not been able to secure the well-armed and disciplined troops at Calais? When he belatedly arrived in London flaunting the royal arms and physically laid his hands on the throne in Westminster Hall, a sign of confidence, he met unexpected resistance. Even Warwick, to whose victory he owed his return, argued fiercely with him in private,
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while the principal peers and bishops objected to York now claiming to be the rightful king via descent from Edward III's second son Lionel on the grounds that he had always previously borne the arms of (i.e. claimed descent via) the fourth son Edmund, Duke of York. By that legal argument, York had always acknowledged that he was the representative of a line junior to Henry's, not of the genealogically senior line of Lionel. The use by York of the ‘heir of Edward III's second son' argument as his justification implied that Henry had never been rightful king, and neither had Henry IV or V; it was more legally dangerous than the argument for deposing a–rightful–king for misrule that had disposed of Edward II in 1327 and Richard II in 1399. The arguments used against Edward and Richard could have been used against the equally incompetent and partisan Henry VI,but his mental illness was a potential argument for sparing him the harsh political fate of these rulers.