Warwick the Kingmaker (34 page)

Fighting had been no part of the Yorkist plan: ‘hit was not thare entent, but happeth casually and ayenst thar wyll’.112 It was to have serious repercussions. The battle demonstrated Salisbury’s rebellious intentions and caused the king to proclaim those involved to be traitors.113 That discouraged others from joining, most notably Warwick’s own brother-in-law Stanley, husband of his sister Eleanor and the most powerful magnate in north-west England. Once again the three Yorkist lords failed to find ‘lordis of like disposicion’ to join them. Sympathizers and those who shared some of their grievances, such as the Bourchier peers, again failed to commit themselves. The Yorkists’ final appeal to the king was once again in the names only of York, Salisbury and Warwick. Denunciation as traitors also rendered unreliable those already recruited, none of whom had been told that treason was intended and whom the king conceded had been ‘blynded’ by the blandishments of their lords.114 Warwick’s contingent from Calais may have specifically requested and secured prior assurances that they were not being led against the king.115

The element of surprise was lost. Whilst Warwick did evade Somerset and joined his father and uncle, they were henceforth isolated – Clinton and Grey of Powys being the only peers to join them116 – and on the defensive. They could not add substantially to their forces, for the king barred access to most of the kingdom, whilst the longer the confrontation lasted the more lords, retainers and ‘naked men’ (county levies) joined him. The Yorkists advanced from Ludlow through Worcester, where they faced the king’s army in battle array, and then withdrew successively to Warwick’s town of Tewkesbury, across the Severn to Ludlow, and thence to nearby Ludford, where they made their final stand. They drew up their forces above the River Teme in a defensive position, which they fortified additionally with carts, guns and obstacles. They fired on the king’s forces ‘aswell at youre most Roiall persone as at youre Lordes and people with You than and there being’: clear treason. To embolden their men, that treason was not an issue, they proclaimed that the king was dead and even celebrated mass for his soul. Henry, unfortunately, showed himself to be alive, promised pardons to those who submitted, and thus induced Trollope’s crucial Calais contingent to desert on the night of 12/13 October. The Yorkist leadership abandoned their army during the night. Warwick, Salisbury and York’s eldest son fled to Calais, York and his next son Rutland to Ireland. Henry had rightly based his strategy on the unwillingness of the Yorkist rank-and-file to face him: on his moral authority, which incorporated the duty of allegiance that overrode other loyalties, the dread due to God’s representative, and the horror with which treason was regarded. He wrongly expected Yorkist commanders would retrieve their desperate situation by submitting.

It is not clear how early the Yorkists wrote to the king to tell him that they sought the prosperity and advancement of him and the common weal. Henry refused to meet them, we may deduce, unless they laid down their arms and came as obedient subjects. Next they prepared an indenture testifying to their loyalty before independent witnesses in Worcester Cathedral, and consecrated it by taking communion at the hands of the notable canonist Master William Lyndwood. This process (so reminiscent of 1452) could be expected to appeal to the pious king and demonstrated, so they claimed, their loyalty and good intentions. They sent him one part of the indenture through an intermediary, the prior of Worcester. When this failed to secure the desired response, they certi-fied the indenture to the king again by the hand of Garter king of arms. In a final letter of 10 October, which they sent from Ludlow to the king at Leominster, they made a direct appeal to him in person, whom they rightly saw as more open to persuasion and reconciliation than those about him. All they asked, so they said, was to make their complaints to their sovereign in surety: safe from arrest and violence? They were loyal subjects, they said, who had eschewed any effusion of blood – the dead of Blore Heath, by implication, had been the aggressors – and they would fight only if they had no choice. Their obligation as loyal subjects to submit unconditionally to royal authority was not regarded as an option. Nevertheless, so they complained, they had been unjustly accused of disloyalty and their tenants had been unlawfully despoiled. Their opponents were actuated by greed for a share of their estates. They urged Henry to accept their protestations of loyalty as set out in their Worcester indenture and not to allow himself to be influenced by their enemies, who coveted their lands and cared not for the effusion of Christian blood.117

Their appeal sounds reasonable. It was designed to touch both the king and those around him and has impressed some modern historians, who strangely perceive the Yorkists seeking a negotiated settlement rather than continuing their defiance. It failed. It contained no recognition that the Yorkists as subjects were engaged in rebellion or in treason. They expected their case to be conceded as well as heard and they were confident that it would be conceded once heard. Again they thought that they could mould King Henry as they wished. But it was too late and misjudged the king. By 10 October Henry was too strong to offer them what they were seeking and replied that he would see them on the field of battle. Judging from Waurin, the Yorkist line once again was that their missives were kept from the king and that others were in command, but this time Henry was not the tool in the hands of evil councillors that they portrayed. It was he himself who had declared at the Coventry great council that he would no longer tolerate the use of force and who promised to punish future offenders according to their deserts. Henry now took the lead in the repression. He had already made them a most generous offer of terms that guaranteed them their lives and property.

Henry was a merciful man and a most remarkable conciliator. There can surely have been few if any English kings who had been so prepared to let bygones be bygones, who had placed such emphasis on reconciliation, and who was so ready to work with those who had offended him. Faced with the incorrigible insurrections of the Yorkists and the verdict against them of the Lords at the Coventry great council, he had forgiven them, though for the last time. Following yet another attempted Yorkist coup, he was prepared to negotiate – hence the presence with the Yorkists of Garter king of arms – and offered to pardon them yet again. This was at Worcester in the person of Bishop Beauchamp. Whetehamstede reports that Henry not only offered them their lives, liberty, and property, but also to receive them once again as his dear kin and to treat them with the same favour as before.118. The offer excluded those who had already been proclaimed as traitors for the battle of Blore Heath, presumably Salisbury, his younger sons, Harrington and Stanley. This may have been crucial – Salisbury cannot have liked it and Warwick could have lost his Neville inheritance – but they could reasonably hope for further clemency later. For York and Warwick a return to the
status quo ante
without penalty was surely better than any defeated rebel could reasonably expect. Amazingly the time-limit of six days for acceptance of this pardon was allowed to expire. Again, on the eve of Ludford, Henry offered pardons of life and limb to all who submitted; those who accepted recovered their lands soon after. In between, the summonses for a new parliament, issued on 9 October, a day before the Leominster letter and two days before Ludford, are as likely to have assured the Yorkists of a public hearing as threatened them with destruction.119 And as we shall see, even when the Yorkists were attainted, King Henry explicitly reserved the right to forgive and restore those attainted without further recourse to parliament.120

These were generous terms that deny any justice to the Yorkists’ claim that they were driven to extremes by desperation arising from harsh treatment. However, they make no concessions to the Yorkists’ persistent and passionate, if irrational and unacceptable, belief, that they were loyal and that their coup did not contradict their oaths. They were right and everybody else was wrong. Further insight into their mentality is offered by Abbot Whetehamstede’s report of a speech by Warwick which, though Latinized, literary and embroidered, rings several bells. Warwick gave three reasons. First of all, he said, they had learnt that the king’s pardons even when confirmed by parliament provided no protection. Here is surely a reference to their indictment at Coventry on charges covered by pardons and which had even, in the case of St Albans, been confirmed by parliament. Secondly, because those about the king did not observe his commands. They were men without prudence and counsel who needed reforming. The Yorkists, it seemed, would not accept a pardon that did not remove the current government and, by implication, replace its members with themselves! They would only cease their rebellion if they secured the objective for which they had rebelled! And thirdly, Warwick stated, they refused because the pardon offered them no real protection at great councils and parliaments, as Warwick himself could testify from his own experience when attending a great council at Westminster to which he had been summoned by writ of privy seal and when counselling the king. This was a reference to the incident in November 1458.121

Whetehamstede’s account is consistent with the stance of the Yorkists presented somewhat later in the
Somnium Vigilantis
. it explains what is otherwise inexplicable: why Warwick and the others rejected Henry’s offer. All three, it seems, no longer had any confidence in the king’s promises. Warwick, it seems, was finally disillusioned by the attack on him in Westminster Hall; for his father and uncle, it was their trial at Coventry on old forgiven charges that was conclusive. Hence they rejected the lifeline that the king offered them. The time for conciliation had passed. It was all or nothing now. They had passed impercept-ibly from coups d’état, taking over the existing government, to civil war. They had rejected the consensus of the Lords at Coventry and now they rejected the military logic of their position. Their defiance threatened them with death and ruin. When Trollope deserted, they could still have made their peace and secured pardons, as so many of their leading followers did, but they did not seek them. That they did not, that they accepted the inevitable attainder that followed, surely means that even as they fled they intended to renew the struggle and to secure more than they had been offered. Even in defeat and flight, the Yorkist lords were already committed to seizing power by force once again. That was a mutual understanding before they fled. Probably they already hoped to achieve their objectives peacefully, by playing once again on Henry’s clemency, from a position of strength.

NOTES

1. Harriss, ‘Struggle’, 44–7. The commissioners included Fauconberg, Sir Edmund Mulsho, Osbert Mountford, Richard Whetehill and John Proud, ibid. 46n.

2.
Paston L & P
ii. 143, 148; E 28/86/40, 42, 44.

3. Harriss, ‘Struggle’, 46. Warwick’s letter from London to Burford corporation (Oxon.) of 5 Aug. probably belongs to this year,
HMC Var. Coll.
i. 49.

4. Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 772–3. Lancaster herald was sent by king and council to assist him in dealing with James II, E 403/807 m. 8.

5. A. Gross,
The Dissolution of the Lancastrian Kingship
(Stamford, 1996), 47.

6. Wolffe,
Henry VI
, 302.

7. Ibid. 309.

8. Gross,
Dissolution
, 58; Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 774.

9. Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 802.

10. Storey,
Lancaster
, 177.

11. Gascoigne,
Loci e Libro Veritatum
, 204.

12.
Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals
, ed. L. C. Loyd and D. M. Stenton (Northants Rec. Soc. xv, 1950), no. 229.

13. Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 809.

14. C 81/1465/1. The other coheir was Humphrey Bourchier, son of Lord Bourchier, E 159/232 recorda Easter 34 Hen. VI rot. 3(3)d.

15. C 139/162/17/1–2;
CPR 1452–61
, 358; E 401/836.

16. Storey,
Lancaster
, 178–9; Johnson,
York
, 176; Griffiths,
King & Country
, 213.

17. Johnson,
York
, 177–8; Robbins,
Hist. Poems
, 189–90, 355; Griffiths,
King &
Country
, 214; A. Herbert, ‘Herefordshire 1413–61: Some Aspects of Society and Public Order’,
Patronage, The Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England
, ed. R. A. Griffiths (Gloucester, 1981), 103–22.

18. Watts,
Henry VI
, 335; Gross,
Dissolution
, 49n. Bothe and Waynflete were appropriately qualified clerics, the latter being the king’s rather than the queen’s man; Shrewsbury was a magnate. Compare the more measured judgement of Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 773 & n.

19. Worcs. RO 989/112; Warwick RO CR 26/4, f. 69.

20. Johnson,
York
, 177.

21.
Paston L & P
ii. 172;
CCR 1454–61
, 300–1;
Pedes Finium for the County of Somerset,
Henry IV to Henry VI
(Somerset Rec. Soc. xxiii, 1906), 205; CP 25(1)/293/73/426; see also
RP
v. 387–8. Her relief was paid 3 October 1457, E 401/853 m. 1.

22. Madox,
Formulare Anglicanum
, 102–3;
pace
Summerson,
Medieval Carlisle
, 443.

23. Storey,
Lancaster
, 181.

24.
The Brut
, 527.

25.
DKR
xlviii (1887), 424.

26. Griffiths,
Henry VI
, 799, 805;
Six Town Chronicles
, 144.