The War of the Roses (8 page)

In 1267–70 Prince Edward (acting on behalf of the enfeebled Henry III) had enforced the terms of victory by one struggling faction, with some diplomatic concessions to de Montfort allies required by the strength of resistance after the battle of Evesham; in 1322–6 Edward II and the Despensers had temporarily won out but later been overthrown, as had the ‘Appellants' after 1388. Mortimer and Isabella had lost personal control to Edward III in 1330 and some enemies had been rehabilitated, but the destruction of Edward II's faction was not reversed; Henry IV had permanently won out in 1399 despite severe challenges. Stability and a firm sense of purpose at the centre of power was apparent on each of these occasions; there was no such stability backing compromise in 1456–8 or the permanent victory of one faction in 1455 or 1459. The absence on these occasions of a strong, legitimate, and unchallengeable executive authority was vital; ironically, if Henry VI had been permanently mentally incapable from 1453 the chances of a permanent settlement being enforced by a ‘royal substitute' regent (York) would have been greater.

Also, unlike in 1265–70 and 1326, the defeated faction of 1455 (the Beauforts) still possessed some residual power with the slaughtered court magnates' heirs being in possession of lands and private retinues with a capacity to take revenge; the de Montforts had been destroyed in 1265–6 and the Despensers had been destroyed in 1326. The necessities of compromise had left Richard II's ‘duketti' and some allies with a degree of power in 1399, despite the destruction of Richard II's ‘new men' Bushy, Bagot, and Greene –and in 1400 and 1403–5 the defeated Ricardians had duly challenged Henry IV. By 1459 the Queen and her allies were duly seeking a similar political (and personal?) elimination of the Yorkist leadership.

The Queen's perceived enmity made the succession of her son Edward as Henry's successor unacceptable to York and his supporters, making the danger of implacable factional feuds at court seem long term. In return, the rumours about his parentage (perceived to come from the Yorkists) and the violence York had shown in enforcing control of politics in 1455 would not make the Queen willing to see York as regent or as ‘guardian' of her son as king. If Henry died, who would control political life until ‘Edward IV's majority, c. 1469? (Henry VI, born December 1421, came of age in 1437.) Given recent precedents, the new King's nearest male kin–i.e. York–had the prior claim to being his personal governor or Protector, as had Henry of Lancaster for Edward III in 1327, John ‘of Gaunt' for Richard II in 1377, and Duke Humphrey for Henry VI in 1422–but not to full power as regent. Margaret had every reason to fear York in either role, and he had reason to fear for his safety from his vengeful rivals if excluded from power. There was thus every prospect of a long-term vacancy of strong kingship under an enfeebled king and a young heir, and by 1459–60 a solution was being sought by York's party in terms of the Prince's exclusion from the throne–and later in 1460 by removing the King too. This drastic measure duly alienated assorted nobles who were prepared to back York against the court faction, as seen in the shocked reaction to his claim to the throne in 1460. It was the mixture of this prospect of long-term instability and the physical/political survival of part of the defeated factions in the confrontations of 1455 and 1459–60 that made the struggles for power after 1450 far less easy to resolve than those of earlier centuries.

The deaths of York's chief court foes at St Albans in May 1455 only transferred the enmity to their heirs who became close to the Queen. Equally, the weak control of the government–King or substitute–over defiant armed magnates meant a plethora of local clashes and the danger that if York seemed to be backing his local partisans against a court ally this could be interpreted as treason (as over his attitude to the Courtenay/Bonville clash of 1456).
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Nor could Margaret and her allies trust York's headship of a regency Council if Henry died or became permanently incapacitated. Once the succession of Prince Edward could not be trusted to guarantee York's position, the drastic step of removing him and his mother was inevitable. This, in turn, brought the danger of this controversial step adding to the number of magnates who would rally to the Queen and the Beauforts against a Yorkist ‘usurpation'. The resulting conflict would be resolved by force, and the physical survival of the rival contenders (even in exile) would lengthen the conflict–as York and his sons were able to restore their position after the 1459 debacle at Ludlow in 1460, and as Margaret and the Beauforts were able to challenge York in December 1460 and his son Edward IV in 1462-4 and 1470.

 

(i) Ludlow 1459 and the deposition of Henry VI. A missed opportunity for the Queen to prevent further revolts?

This emphasizes the importance of what did not happen at Ludlow in 1459, and the crucial fact that York was able to escape from encirclement. Unlike in 1455, the challenged court party had a large army–centred on the men the Queen had been raising in Cheshire–at its disposal, to add to the presence of the King to lead the army as a sign that resistance was treason (which had not worked in 1455). York had blocked the royal advance at Ludford, across the River Teme south of Ludlow, but then Andrew Trollope's Calais troops had defected to the King. Only the narrow Teme bridge now protected Ludlow from assault on 13 October. In physical terms, the royal army could easily have sent troops round the mile or so of woodlands on the south-west bank of the River Teme from Ludford Bridge (the south entrance to the town) to the western bridge, by which York escaped, to block the latter. Were they unfamiliar with the layout of the town, did they fear ambush by York's men in the thick woods, or did some ‘moderate' leaders of the royal forces seek to avoid a bloodbath and thus let York escape?

Certainly, when the town fell there was some killing by the royal troops, although Duchess Cecily and her younger children were spared and were not placed in permanent secure custody as hostages.
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Had York, his two elder sons, and their Neville ally Salisbury and his son Warwick been killed by Margaret's men in a Wakefield-style slaughter at Ludlow in 1459 there would have been a chance of a long era of court supremacy as there would have been no major adult royal challenger at large in exile (as in 1326 and 1399). But, as seen in France over the killings of Louis of Orleans in 1407 and John of Burgundy in 1419, a blood-feud by the murdered dynast's heirs was liable to make such drastic solutions temporary. The Percies had survived two shattering defeats and the deaths of their male leadership (‘Hotspur' and Thomas, earl of Worcester, in 1403 and the Earl of Northumberland in 1405-8); the Nevilles would have survived the loss of Salisbury and Warwick, both of whom had a multitude of younger brothers and married sisters to plan revenge.

It is one of the forgotten facts of the mid-fifteenth century dynastic conflicts that the large number of males in successive generations of the Neville and Percy families–each in need of lands, titles, and an heiress wife –made the chances of major conflict in the north far more likely. York's brother-in-law Salisbury was the son of the second marriage of Earl Ralph (Neville) of Westmorland, and so in need of a landed base of his own with most of the ancestral Neville lands going to his elder half-brother. He had three younger brothers who acquired secular lordships (Bergavenny/ Abergavenny, Latimer, and Fauconberg) plus one who became Bishop of Salisbury. His son Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick by marriage, acquired a crucial claim on his wife's ancestors' Despenser lands in South Wales–also claimed by the Beauforts, which led to armed conflict in the mid-1450s. Richard Neville would not have been in this position to quarrel with the King's Beaufort favourites had his wife's brother Henry Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, not died childless in 1446, leaving her sole Beauchamp heiress. It is also notable that it was a younger son of the (Percy) Earl of Northumberland, Lord Egremont–also keen on carving out his own lands –who was the principal aggressor in the Percy vs Neville clashes of the mid-late 1450s, with Warwick's younger brother Thomas as his principal foe. These local feuds were ‘side-shows' to the tension at court, but the existence of rival claims to lands and of restless and acquisitive younger brothers of major peers added to the escalation of violence.

 

(ii) York's genealogical luck

It was important that the position that York was in as heir to a childless King –and then rival to his son–was exacerbated by the near-extinction of the Lancastrian male line. Henry V's next brother, Thomas, had married (Margaret Holland) but been killed in 1421 before he could have children. John, Duke of Bedford, had had none by either Anne of Burgundy or Jacquetta of St Pol–and the latter was to produce over a dozen children by her next husband, Sir Richard Woodville. Nor did Duke Humphrey have children by his wives, Duchess Jacqueline of Holland (a brief ‘political' marriage to enable him to claim her lands) and the socially ‘inferior' ex-lady-in-waiting Eleanor Cobham. Any male children of these marriages would have had precedence over York in the 1440s and 1450s, and a daughter would have posed a problem to his claims as he could not disavow her rights to the throne without putting at risk his own claims to inherit by female descent (from Edward III's second surviving son Lionel, senior to the Lancastrian progenitor John ‘of Gaunt').

Had such a rival Lancastrian male heir existed, possibly born as early as c. 1420 (Thomas' son), he would have had prior claim to the Protectorship during Henry's illness in 1453. York would still have been in a strong political/military position as the spokesman of the ‘war party' in France in the 1440s and arch-rival of the popularly loathed Suffolk, but not have been next heir male to Henry. He would have had to base any claim to the throne solely on the prior rights of the heir of Lionel of Clarence over the House of Lancaster, not on the bastardy of Prince Edward from 1453. This would have lost him even more support among the peers, adding to those who in real life objected to his claim in October 1460. A son of a brother of Henry V could still have been ‘bought off' or excluded by a militarily more powerful rival, as Henry IV had enforced his right to the throne on the country in September 1399 despite Richard II naming the Mortimer claimant as his heir. But the superseded Lancastrian dynast, probably born between 1420 (Thomas' son) and c. 1435–40 (Humphrey's son by Eleanor), would have been as much of a threat to York as Edmund Mortimer was to Henry IV.

 

(iii) The battle of Wakefield, 30 December 1460; if there had been no catastrophe how would it have affected the 1460s and 1470s?

It should be remarked that York's unexpected death on 30 December 1460 was entirely avoidable. Controlling most of the south of England, he was being defied in arms in Yorkshire by Somerset, Exeter, and other magnates who had marched unopposed from their base in the south-west to link up with the Percies while the Queen collected a new army in Scotland. Somerset's father and the late (Percy) Earl of Northumberland had died at York's hands, as had the father of the energetic young northern magnate Lord Clifford–thus the principal ‘Lancastrian' leaders could not be expected to accept or trust York as controller of the government. Clifford, as memorably portrayed by Shakespeare (based on Tudor chronicles with memories of contemporary accounts), was particularly implacable and ready for vengeance. Owen Tudor, Queen Catherine's widower, and his second son, Jasper, were also resisting York in Wales–and Owen's eldest son Edmund (father of Henry VII) had died in captivity in 1456 after capture by York's allies in a struggle to control south-west Wales. Another round of warfare could be expected within months, and York's attempt to make his ascendancy in London permanent by claiming the throne had met large-scale resistance from the peerage.

Marching north early in December to defend his pillaged Yorkshire estates from the Lancastrians, York was based at his residence of Sandal Castle over Christmas 1460 while Somerset with a larger army was based nearby at Pontefract Castle awaiting the Queen. Some sort of a truce was negotiated, but Somerset returned to the offensive and harassed the Yorkists, possibly infiltrating his men into Sandal Castle to spread reassuring stories that his army was smaller than in reality. Lured out to respond to the provocations, York was ambushed outside Wakefield as two hidden Lancastrian ‘wings' emerged from nearby woods to assist the relatively small force he was facing openly. He fell fighting; his second son, Edmund, and Salisbury's younger son, Thomas, also fell (Edmund reputedly killed by Lord Clifford in cold blood) and Salisbury was captured and later beheaded.
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The Yorkist claim to the throne thus passed to York's eldest son, Edward, currently raising their levies in the Welsh Marches, who first had to defeat the Tudors' army and occupy London ahead of the Queen. On 3 March a group of Yorkist peers and prelates in London chose Edward as king, and he assumed the Crown by occupying the throne in Westminster Hall on the 4th.

York had shown one serious miscalculation in claiming the throne as opposed to merely another Protectorship in October. He had been implacable towards Somerset's father in having him thrown in the Tower of London while he was ‘Protector' in 1453–4, thereby showing his attitude to compromise. His death at Wakefield was due to another miscalculation, and although his cause in the north needed urgent reinforcement in December he could easily have sent the veteran Salisbury (a local Neville) and his son Thomas on their own. Alternatively, as holding out at Sandal would expose him to a siege when the Queen's army arrived, he had the option of withdrawing south and evading battle. He could then have linked up with Warwick in time to meet the Queen and Somerset at a more evenly-matched battle as they marched south in February. Edward would still have been preoccupied with the Tudor army (which he defeated on 2/3 February at Mortimer's Cross).