26
Anne, Countess of Warwick, had been travelling towards Dorset, hoping to meet up with Queen Margaret and her troops. On the way, however, she received reports of the Battle of Barnet, and then came the grievous news of her husband’s death. Fearing that King Edward’s vengeance would fall upon her, the Countess fled through the New Forest and sought sanctuary in the Cistercian abbey at Beaulieu. Here she would remain for more than a year, until Gloucester, who had prevailed upon the King to declare her legally dead and settle upon him half her lands, took her to live with him – as a prisoner, according to John Rous – in his household at Middleham.
On Easter Monday, Queen Margaret and her company rode to the Benedictine abbey at Cerne in Dorset, where they would stay for the next ten days. Abbot Roger Beyminster extended a warm welcome to the Queen and lodged her in the abbey guest house, the remains of which may still be seen today. Soon, Margaret was joined by Pembroke, Devon and the Beaufort brothers, Somerset and his younger brother, Sir John, who broke the news of Warwick’s defeat and death at Barnet. The shock caused her to collapse in a faint. Edward Hall records that when she recovered her senses and could speak she ‘reviled the calamitous times in which she lived and reproached herself for all her painful labours, now turned to her own misery, and declared she desired rather to die than live longer in this state of infelicity’. Her chief concern now was the Prince’s safety, and she ‘passionately implored’ the lords to do all in their power to ensure it. In her opinion, no good could come of a further armed confrontation with King Edward, and therefore it would be best if she and the Prince returned to France, ‘there to tarry until it pleased God to send her better luck’. However, the lords prevailed upon her to remain and pursue her chosen course. Warwick’s defeat had indeed been a setback, but they were confident that there remained many Englishmen who were ready and eager to fight for Lancaster. If she were wise, she would recruit those men and force a final trial of strength with King Edward.
When Margaret was calmer she may have reflected that Warwick’s death was not such a tragedy after all. They had at best been reluctant allies, forced out of necessity to the pact between them, and now, if her army triumphed, the House of Lancaster would be able to reign unhampered by the problem of Warwick.
According to the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, the Lancastrian lords told Margaret that ‘they had already a good puissance in the field and trusted, with the encouragement of her presence and that of the Prince, soon to draw all the northern and western counties to the banner of the red rose’. The Queen and Prince sent out summonses to their supporters, and during the next few days more Lancastrian peers and their companies arrived at Cerne, their appearance reviving Margaret’s spirits. Soon she had recovered her former energy and began to feel more optimistic about the outcome of her enterprise. And still they kept coming, men from Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire, to join her ever-increasing army.
Somerset, Sir John Beaufort, Devon, Wenlock and Langstrother now held a council of war, in which they debated whether the Queen’s army should travel speedily up the west coast, perhaps through Bristol, Gloucester and Chester, and thus reach those parts of Lancashire where they could raise a large force of archers. They were certain that in that region, more than anywhere, the lords and commons would support them. Jasper Tudor was dispatched at once to Wales to recruit an army there, and the final plan was that the Queen would march west and link up with him on her way north.
King Edward was in London when, on 16 April 1471, he received news of the Queen’s landing. Croyland says he was ‘worn down by many different blows’ and had had little time in which to ‘refresh himself. No sooner was he done with one battle in the east than he was faced with another in the western part of England, and had to prepare himself to fight at full strength.’ He had dismissed his army after Barnet and now had to send ‘to all parts to get him fresh men’. He issued a proclamation against the Queen and her supporters, reminding the people that God had vindicated his right to the throne by giving him the victory at Barnet and ‘in divers battles against our great adversary Harry and his adherents’. Speed, he realised, was crucial to his success on this occasion, and, having ordered that workmen be recruited to service and repair the royal ordnance, he went to Windsor to gather an army with Hastings’s help.
On the 23rd, Edward celebrated the Feast of St George with his Knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle, and the next day led his host of more than 3000 foot soldiers west in pursuit of Queen Margaret, hoping to overtake her before she crossed the River Severn and linked up with Jasper Tudor in Wales, which his intelligence sources had advised him was her objective.
Margaret intended to cross the Severn at Gloucester, and although she and her captains took precautions to conceal their movements, Edward’s scouts managed to shadow them for most of the time. To put her pursuers off the scent, her own scouts were ordered to move east, as if the army behind them intended to march on London. At first, the King was taken in by this ruse, but his outriders soon discovered the Queen’s true intention. Thereafter, the Lancastrians ‘knew well that the King ever approached towards them, near and near, ever ready, in good array’, and this made them panicky and all the more eager to press on towards Wales. Nevertheless, their ranks were still swelled daily, for, says Croyland, ‘there were many in the west who favoured King Henry’s cause’. Edward IV, marching at great speed, drove his soldiers on mercilessly, not even allowing them time to stop and eat or forage for food.
From Cerne, the Queen moved west to Exeter, where her appearance, and that of the Prince, inspired the ‘whole might’ of Devon and Cornwall to come flocking to them. Then it was on to Taunton, Glastonbury and Wells, where the Lancastrian army arrived on 27 April and sacked the bishop’s palace. Here, the lords advised the Queen to pause awhile, to allow more men to muster. Although she was anxious to press on, she agreed, saying, ‘I pray God speed us well.’ On that day, the King reached Abingdon, where he received certain intelligence that the Queen was at Wells.
On the 29th, Edward arrived at Cirencester, where he learned that Margaret was on her way north to Bath, thirty miles south-west of his position. Other reports said she would be advancing on Cirencester on 1 May. At this, the King ordered all his men out of the town and set up camp that night three miles away, drawing his troops up in battle order. However, the next day there were no further reports of the enemy moving towards Cirencester, so Edward moved south along the road to Malmesbury, hoping to intercept themthere. The Queen, however, was in Bath on 30 April. Edward, learning of his mistake, went after her there, but when he arrived on 1 May was told that she had gone west to Bristol and was planning to meet him in the field at nearby Chipping Sodbury.
Margaret did indeed arrive at Bristol on 1 May, and received a warm welcome there, being presented with ordnance, provisions and money by the citizens. She ‘took new courage’ at this, but was later disappointed to learn that her captains had not recruited as many men as they had hoped in the city.
After leaving Bristol, Margaret rested a while at Berkeley Castle, scene of the murder of Edward II in 1327. She had left her vanguard at Chipping Sodbury to put the King off her trail, and when, on the 2nd, Edward sent his advance riders there, the two sides engaged in a skirmish, with the Lancastrians managing to capture a number of the Yorkist quartermasters before they withdrew. That afternoon, Edward himself arrived in Chipping Sodbury, and spent the night there, camped in the open ‘on a great and fair large plain called a wold’, thinking that the Lancastrian army was nearby. His scouts, however, found no trace of it.
Back in London, the court anxiously awaited news. ‘We have such different reports’, wrote the Milanese ambassador to King Louis, ‘that I cannot possibly find out the truth.’
On the evening of the 2nd, the Queen left Berkeley Castle and marched through the night to Gloucester, where she planned to cross the Severn. Once she had joined forces with Jasper Tudor, Edward would stand little chance of prevailing against their combined strength. By 3.00 am the next day, the King had received reliable reports that the Lancastrian army had evaded him once more and was moving towards Gloucester. Determined to overtake it before it could cross the river, he at once dispatched a letter to Sir Richard Beauchamp, governor of Gloucester, commanding him to close his gates to the Lancastrians pending the King’s arrival. The royal messenger circumvented the Queen’s army by taking a different route, and reached the city first. Edward, meanwhile, had drawn up his army in battle array and begun a thirty-mile march through the Cotswolds to Cheltenham, leaving at dawn.
At ten o’clock in the morning the Queen and her army reached Gloucester and demanded admission, but the gates remained closed. Beauchamp told her that he and the citizens were bound by their oath of loyalty to the King to oppose her passage. She therefore had no alternative but to cross the River Portway and make for Tewkesbury, ten miles to the north. ‘All that day was ever the King’s host within five or six miles of his enemies; he in the plain country, and they amongst woods, [he] having always good espialls upon them,’ says the Arrivall. However, Edward’s food supplies were dwindling fast, and his men were on short rations. It was very warm, and they were obliged to drink from a brook that was polluted with mire from the carts that had passed by it. Fortunately, their quarry was almost within reach.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of 3 May, Margaret’s great army tramped into Tewkesbury; here they could cross the Severn and pass into Wales. However, having marched for a night and a day, they were ‘right weary, for by that time they had travelled thirty-six long miles in a foul country, all in lanes and stony ways, betwixt woods, without any good refreshing’. Some of the Queen’s soldiers, overcome by heat and exhaustion, had collapsed on the march and been left to fend for themselves. Margaret herself was too exhausted to go any further, and it was decided that everyone should rest for the night and take the field on the morrow. The Queen, the Princess of Wales, the Countess of Devon, Katherine Vaux and other ladies-in-waiting all retired for the night to nearby Glupshill Manor, a house built in 1430 in the shadow of Glupshill Castle, an old Norman motte-and-bailey fortress whose mound may still be seen today.
King Edward had arrived in Cheltenham late that afternoon, to be informed that the Lancastrians were making for Tewkesbury. He ordered his men to rest for a while and ‘a little comforted himself and his people with such meat and drink as he had carried with him’. Then, in the early evening, he pressed on to Tredington, three miles from Tewkesbury, where he set up camp for the night. Like the Lancastrians, his men were so ‘footsore and thirsty’ that they could have marched no further.
At dawn the next day the Lancastrian army began preparing for the battle that would surely take place very soon. Somerset, as commander-in-chief, drew up his men in battle array in a strong position on a hill rising out of a field at the southern end of Tewkesbury, with the town and abbey at their backs, although his captains and the Queen expressed concern that ‘afore them, and on every hand of them, were foul lanes and deep dykes, and many hedges with hills and valleys, a right evil place to approach’, which is still today known as Margaret’s Camp.
Later that morning, the King’s army caught up with the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury, crossing the Swillgate Brook and passing Stonehouse Farm, then taking up battle stations 4-600 yards south of the enemy.
Meanwhile, the Queen and the Prince of Wales had mounted their horses and were riding through the Lancastrian ranks, speaking words of encouragement to their soldiers and promising them fame, glory and great rewards if they fought well. The Queen then left the field and returned to Glupshill Manor, leaving Somerset in command. The Prince, seeing active service for the first time, was to lead the centre, under the tutelage of Wenlock, a seasoned soldier but hardly a wise choice for he had twice changed sides in recent years. Somerset chose to lead the right wing, and gave Devon command of the left. On the Yorkist side, the King commanded the centre, Gloucester the left wing and Hastings the right. Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset, Elizabeth Wydville’s son by her first husband, was to lead the rearguard.
The Lancastrian army numbered around 5-6000 men, the Yorkists around 3500-5000. The King, however, had more noble support than Somerset, and consequently more professional troops with better arms and equipment; nor had his men suffered loss of morale through being hunted down over a number of days.
Somerset’s plan was that Wenlock should attack the Yorkists from the front while he bore down on them from the right side, but it was the King who opened hostilities, leading his army with some difficulty up the hill where the Lancastrians were positioned, and then ordering Gloucester to commence the assault. The Duke led his men across what the Arrivall describes as an ‘evil place’ thick with ‘so many hedges and trees that it was right hard to approach them near and come to hands’. For an hour, his soldiers, armed with the cannon captured after Barnet and traditional English longbows, inflicted many casualties, loosing upon the enemy ‘right a-sharp shower’ of arrows, so that it appeared that the Yorkists already had the advantage. Then Gloucester gave the order to sound the retreat, an old ruse intended to provoke the enemy into leaving a good defensive position. Somerset fell into the trap, leading his men in a headlong charge down the hill, shouting at Wenlock and Prince Edward to follow him, and crashing full tilt into the Yorkist left flank.
Because he feared an ambush by Lancastrian cavalry hidden in the trees, the King had prudently detailed 2-300 spearmen to deploy themselves in a wood or park a quarter of a mile to the right of the Lancastrian position, there to await orders. At this point their captain, on learning of Somerset’s collision with Gloucester’s men, entered the battle on his own initiative, attacking Somerset from the rear while the Duke and his men were engaged in heavy fighting with Gloucester’s left wing, which had fallen upon them savagely with axes and swords, and the Yorkist centre under King Edward.
Somerset was now surrounded on every side, yet he and his men at first fought furiously. Wenlock, however, made Prince Edward hold back the Lancastrian centre, refusing to let it advance to Somerset’s aid. As a result, the Duke’s men were cut to pieces, which caused his remaining soldiers to panic and begin to flee. At that point, the battle was lost. When Somerset returned to the Lancastrian lines with the remnants of his force and realised that Wenlock had not lifted a finger to help him, he publicly branded him a traitor to his face; then, before Wenlock had a chance to answer, the Duke split his head open with his battle mace. This left the inexperienced Prince Edward in sole command of the Lancastrian centre and vulnerable to a Yorkist charge.
Seizing his advantage, Gloucester led his men in a vicious onslaught on the Lancastrian centre. Prince Edward resisted valiantly, but his line broke and his men scrambled off in a full-scale retreat. King Edward now surged forward to fill in the gap left by Somerset, and there followed a desperate rout in which the Lancastrians fled the field, hotly pursued by Yorkists out for their blood. Many were cut down as they ran, while others sought refuge in Tewkesbury Abbey, little realising that it did not enjoy the privilege of sanctuary. Hundreds tried to escape by crossing the River Severn, but perished there by drowning or at the hands of their pursuers. A good many more were trapped and slaughtered near the abbey mill, but the worst carnage was to be seen on the battlefield, which is still called the ‘Bloody Meadow’ and was then rough pasture.
During the rout, bands of Yorkist soldiers forced their way into Tewkesbury Abbey and ran riot through its sacred buildings, looting and vandalising as they went. Anyone who stood in their way was dealt with viciously, and Lancastrian soldiers who had sought refuge were savagely dispatched, their blood desecrating the sanctified ground. In the sacristy today is a wooden door completely covered with plates of armour stripped from Lancastrian casualties or prisoners. In places, the armour is perforated with gunshot or arrow holes.
King Edward had won what Croyland calls ‘a famous victory’, having at last inflicted a devastating and final defeat on the Lancastrians, 2000 of whom were killed in the battle. Among the dead were Somerset’s younger brother, Sir John Beaufort, who was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey, Sir Walter Courtenay, Sir William Vaux, Sir Robert Whittingham, Sir William Roos and Sir Edmund Hampden, all stalwart supporters of the Queen. The chief Yorkist casualty was the King’s cousin, Humphrey Bourchier, son of York’s sister Isabella. Yet by far the most important casualty of all was Prince Edward of Lancaster.
Commines and most other contemporary writers state that the Prince ‘died in the field’, and on 6 May Clarence reported that he ‘had been slain in plain battle’. The Arrivall, the official Yorkist account of the battle, says that the Prince ‘was taken fleeing to the townwards and slain in the field’, crying ‘for succour to his brother-in-law, Clarence’.
But Croyland, writing in 1486 after Edward IV and his brothers were dead, states rather ambiguously that the Prince died ‘either on the field, or after the battle, by the avenging hands of certain persons’. The sixteenth-century historians Vergil, More and Hall all implicate Gloucester in his death, stating that the Prince was taken during the rout and brought before King Edward when the battle had ended. The King received him graciously and asked him to explain why he had taken up arms against him. The young man retorted defiantly, ‘I came to recover my father’s heritage. My father has been miserably oppressed, and the crown usurped.’ This made Edward angry, and with ‘a look of indignation’ he slapped the Prince across the mouth with his gauntlet. At that moment Clarence, Gloucester and Hastings raised their swords and cut him down.
This tale may not have been an invention. In the confusion following the battle, it would not have been difficult to make it appear that the Prince had fallen in the field. Tudor chroniclers were happy to slander Gloucester – later the notorious Richard III – but had no reason to defame without due cause Edward IV or Lord Hastings, who was usually depicted by them as a noble hero. If the motive behind the tale was to discredit Gloucester, why not allege that he alone had murdered the Prince? But Edward IV had many sound reasons for wanting the young man dead, and when the opportunity presented itself would doubtless have been happy for his closest supporters to take advantage of it. Indeed, the murder may even have been premeditated and planned. Clarence’s use of the words ‘plain battle’ may have been significantly over-emphatic, and Croyland was certainly hinting that there was more to the Prince’s death than contemporary reports had made clear.
With Prince Edward died the hopes of the House of Lancaster. His remains were ‘homely interred with the other simple corpses in the church of the monastery of the black monks in Tewkesbury’ with only ‘maimed rites’. A modern diamond of brass beneath the church tower and a vaulted roof emblazoned with gilded suns in splendour (placed there to commemorate the Yorkist victory) marks his resting place, and bears the Latin inscription:
Here lies Edward, Prince of Wales,
cruelly slain while a youth.
Anno Domini 1471.
Alas, the savagery of men,
Thou art the sole light of thy mother,
the last hope of thy race.
While the Battle of Tewkesbury raged, Queen Margaret and Anne Neville had remained with the other ladies in their party at Glupshill Manor, anxiously awaiting news. When a messenger brought them the dreadful tidings of the Lancastrian defeat, the Queen determined on flight, but was so overcome by the realisation of the disaster that had overtaken her and anxiety as to the fate of her son, of whom there was no news as yet, that she fainted and had to be carried out by her ladies to a waiting litter. She and her party then travelled to a house called Payne’s Place in the village of Bushley, where a loyal family was willing to hide them for the night.
After the battle, Somerset and other Lancastrian leaders, including Sir John Langstrother, Sir Humphrey Audley, Sir John Fortescue and Dr John Morton, had sought sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey. Notwithstanding this, they were dragged out by the King’s men. Some were killed on the spot, others were left to await judgement, and the rest, including Fortescue and Morton, remained prisoners for a time.
On 6th May Somerset and twelve others were brought before a military tribunal presided over by Gloucester as Constable of England, and condemned to immediate execution as traitors and rebels. That same day, Somerset was beheaded in the market place at Tewkesbury and buried in the abbey there. He was the last direct male descendant of the Beauforts, and on his death, Margaret Beaufort became the senior representative of her house. The other twelve leaders also suffered that day in the same manner, ‘at the King’s will’. Edward pardoned all the common soldiers who had fought against him.
The Battle of Tewkesbury effectively ended Lancastrian resistance for good, and was the last battle of the wars between Lancaster and York. When it ended, Henry VI was a prisoner, his only son was dead, his wife was in hiding, and the last male heir of the Beauforts – whom Henry might conceivably have chosen to succeed him – had perished. No one yet regarded Henry Tudor, a fourteen-year-old fugitive, as the hope of the House of Lancaster, which now lacked a male heir. The Lancastrian heir-general was Alfonso V, King of Portugal, a descendant of John of Gaunt, and no one in England was going to rise in his favour. Even Margaret Beaufort had abandoned the Lancastrian cause and declared her loyalty to Edward IV. ‘In every part of England’, says theArrivall, ‘it appeared to every man that the said party was extinct and repressed for ever, without any hope of again quickening.’
On 5 May, as the King rode in triumph to Worcester, he had been informed that Queen Margaret could not be found and had probably fled after the battle. In fact, Margaret and Anne Neville had left Payne’s Place and made their way in secret to a fourteenth-century moated and fortified manor house called Birtsmorton Court, a fine building enclosing a courtyard and boasting a handsome hall. The Queen was accommodated in a chamber which still exists, but evidently did not feel it was safe to remain there, for she soon removed herself and her party five miles north-west to Little Malvern Priory in Worcestershire, ‘a poor religious place’ founded in 1171 and situated in woodland beneath Hereford Beacon.
Meanwhile, the King had been receiving reports of rebellions brewing in the north and in Wales, and, having dismissed the soldiers who had fought for him at Tewkesbury, began to recruit a new army. Jasper Tudor had been at Chepstow with Henry Tudor when he learned of the Lancastrian defeat, and was now doing his best to maintain his hold over south Wales. On Edward’s orders, Roger Vaughan of Tretower tried to trap him there, but was unsuccessful, and it was Jasper who managed to capture Vaughan and have him beheaded. Some said that this was in revenge for Vaughan having urged Edward to order the execution of Jasper’s father, Owen Tudor, in 1461. Afterwards, Jasper fled west to Pembroke Castle, where he was besieged by a Yorkist partisan called Morgan Thomas. He was rescued a week later, however, by a loyal supporter and friend, David Thomas.
By 14 May, the King received word that the Earl of Northumberland, now returned to his allegiance, had snuffed out the northern rebellion before it gathered momentum.
King Louis’s worst fears were confirmed on 1 June, when he received credible tidings of Edward’s victory. Charles the Bold, however, was delighted by the news, and hastened to dispatch his envoys to offer his congratulations and remind Edward of the enmity of Louis, urging him to set about re-conquering England’s lost lands in France and assuring him of Burgundy’s assistance in that venture.
For the present, however, the King had more pressing matters to occupy him. On 7 May Queen Margaret and Anne Neville had been discovered by Sir William Stanley and his men at Little Malvern Priory and taken into custody. It was Stanley who informed the Queen, none too gently, of her son’s death. Margaret collapsed on hearing this bitter news, and had to be dragged almost senseless from the priory by Sir William’s soldiers. On the 11th, both she and Anne Neville were brought before the King at Coventry. Margaret was in a state of great distress, calling down curses on Edward’s head and screaming abuse at him, so that for a time he seriously considered ordering her execution. But then he relented: knights did not behave thus to women, and this woman was distracted by grief and the burden of failure. He would be lenient with her. When she had calmed down, he informed her she would be dealt with honourably and with respect, to which she replied, with commendable meekness, that she placed herself ‘at his commandment’. On the 14th Edward left Coventry for London with Margaret of Anjou in his train, having consigned Anne Neville to the custody of her brother-in-law, the Duke of Clarence, who arranged for her to enter his household, where she would come under the care of her elder sister, the Duchess Isabel. Her name does not appear among those of the prisoners who rode with Edward to London.
While these events were taking place, says Croyland, ‘the frenzy of the King’s enemies was in no way quelled, particularly in Kent, and their numbers increased in spite of the fact that King Edward’s double victory seemed to all a clear sign of the justice of his cause. Incited by the few men who remained of those who had been with the Earl of Warwick, as well as by the Calais regulars, sailors and pirates, such men assembled under the command of Thomas, Bastard of Fauconberg.’ Fauconberg was Warwick’s cousin and had managed to retain control of the Earl’s ships. On hearing of Warwick’s death at Barnet, he had landed in Kent and begun to incite rebellion, calling himself ‘captain and leader of our liege lord Henry’s people in Kent’.
Men came flocking to him ‘from the furthest corners of Kent’, ready to march on London. Sir Geoffrey Gate, who had taken asylum in Calais, sent Fauconberg 300 soldiers, while the mayor of Canterbury joined him with 200 citizens. ‘In Essex,’ records the Great Chronicle of London, ‘the faint husbands cast from them their sharp scythes and armed them with their wives’ smocks, cheese cloths and old sheets, and weaponed them with heavy and great clubs and long pitchforks and staves, and so in all haste sped them towards London, and so joined unto the Kentishmen.’ Many, says the Arrivall, ‘would right fain have still been at home and not to have run into the danger of such rebellion’.
The rebels travelled to the capital by road and by boat along the Thames, ‘surveying all the ways in and out of London, to discover what forces would be necessary and how they might enter to pillage that most wealthy of cities’. On 8 May, Fauconberg, from his base at Sittingbourne, demanded that the Lord Mayor of London open the city gates to him, but the Londoners had already learned of the King’s victory at Tewkesbury and were not going to be bullied. When Edward IV heard of Fauconberg’s rising, he sent commissions of array out to many shires and within days ‘there came to him men to the number of 30,000’, according to Warkworth.
On the 13th, the Bastard appeared before London on the Surrey shore of the Thames and announced his intention of taking the city and freeing Henry VI from the Tower. But God, says Croyland, ‘gave stout hearts to the people of London that they might stand firm in the battle’. The Lord Mayor and aldermen refused him entry, saying they were holding the capital for King Edward. Fauconberg then marched his men to Kingston and crossed the Thames there, intending to lead an assault on Westminster, but when he received reports that the King’s army would soon be at his back, he retreated to Southwark, near to where his ships were moored. He then lined his guns up along the shore and fired upon the Tower, where Queen Elizabeth and her children were in residence and ‘all likely to stand in the greatest jeopardy that ever there was’. Elizabeth’s brother, Lord Rivers, was in command of the Tower, and ably defended the city against its attackers, ordering an intense bombardment of Fauconberg’s position by the cannon on the Tower walls and beating off the rebel assault.
The following day, Fauconberg made a futile attempt to fire London Bridge, but was driven back by cannonfire. Meanwhile, 3000 of his men had burst into the city through St Katherine’s Docks and were rampaging through the streets, firing guns and arrows indiscriminately, pillaging, and setting fire to Aldgate and Bishopsgate. At that point the Earl of Essex arrived to reinforce the city levies and sent them against the rebels, just as Rivers was sallying forth from the Tower with 4500 men. Fierce fighting ensued, and many of Fauconberg’s men were killed. Gradually the rebels were forced back to the banks of the Thames, and from there they were pursued to their ships, although not before they had impudently led away fifty of Butcher Gould’s oxen – destined to feed the Queen’s household – from their grazing place by the Tower.
On the 15th the rebels retreated quietly enough to Blackheath, where they regrouped. However, at news that the King was advancing at the head of 30,000 men, all their courage melted away, and they decided that they should disperse. The Duke of Gloucester, riding ahead of the King’s main force, received Fauconberg’s submission. Nothing now stood in the way of Edward’s triumphal return to London.
On Tuesday 21 May, the King was formally welcomed by the Lord Mayor and the city fathers at Islington and then, accompanied by a larger retinue than was usual, which included almost the entire peerage of England, he rode into the capital, says Croyland, ‘ordering his standards to be unfurled and borne before him. Many who saw this were surprised and amazed, for no enemy remained to be dealt with, but this prudent prince was familiar with the untrustworthy ways of the people of Kent and resolved not to lay down his arms until he had punished those rebellious men, which he did soon after.’ He also knighted those who had distinguished themselves in the defence of London.
Praise of the King ‘sounded through all lands’ and the Londoners were enthusiastic in their acclaim of his triumph, cheering exuberantly and crying out blessings upon him. He had emerged victorious after a brilliant campaign, during the course of which he had eliminated most of his enemies. His success had not only been due to his speed, tenacity and daring, but also to his outstanding abilities as a general and his deployment of men of calibre in positions of command.
But if there was triumph in London that day, there was also the manifestation of tragedy, for ahead of the King in the procession was borne a litter in which sat Margaret of Anjou, exposed to the derision and taunts of the crowds and tasting the bitter dregs of humiliation and grief. As she passed, bystanders flung mud and stones at her and yelled abuse.
Henry VI was still in the Tower, but Fauconberg, by rising in the name of Lancaster, had virtually signed his death warrant. With Prince Edward dead, Edward IV no doubt felt that there was every justification for removing the deposed King. While Henry lived, there would always be further military confrontations involving pointless loss of life and consumption of the Crown’s revenues, and with these demands on his purse and his energies, Edward IV could not hope to make progress with his programme of reconstruction. There was no point in allowing civil war to continue unchecked. Therefore Henry must die.
‘And in the same night that King Edward came to London,’ wrote Warkworth, whose account is contemporary, ‘King Henry, being in ward in prison in the Tower of London, was put to death, between eleven and twelve of the clock, being then at the Tower the Duke of Gloucester.’ Tradition has it that Henry’s murderer came upon him as he knelt at prayer in a deep niche in the eastern wall of his chamber in the Wakefield Tower, a room in which the crown jewels were later displayed.
The official account of his death in the Arrivall states that Henry reacted to news of the death of his son, the capture of his wife and the bitter certainty that his cause was ‘utterly despaired of’ with ‘so great despite, ire and indignation that, of pure displeasure and melancholy he died’. Few were deceived by this. The Milanese ambassador in Paris soon heard that King Edward had ‘caused King Henry to be secretly assassinated in the Tower. He has, in short, chosen to crush the seed’. Commines had reason to believe that it was Gloucester who ‘killed poor King Henry with his own hand, or else caused him to be killed in his presence’, while Vergil states that by the time of Henry VII it was generally believed that ‘Gloucester killed him with a sword’. Whatever Richard of Gloucester’sinvolvement – and it seems probable, from Warkworth’s significant mention of him, that his purpose at the Tower that night was to see that the act of regicide was carried out – the order for the murder of Henry VI can only have come from King Edward. Gloucester would not have acted alone in such a matter.
For murder it most certainly was. Henry VI died of the effects of a severe blow to the head. In 1911, when his body was exhumed and examined, his skeleton was found to be in pieces, and the bones of the skull were ‘much broken’, according to the report inArchaeologia. Moreover, ‘to one of the pieces of skull there was still attached some of the hair, which was brown in colour, save in one place, where it was much darker and apparently matted with blood’.
Croyland was in no doubt as to the cause of death.
I shall pass over the discovery of the lifeless body of King Henry in the Tower of London. May God have mercy upon, and grant sufficient time for repentance to him, whoever he may be, who dared to lay sacriligeous hands on the Lord’s Anointed! Let the doer merit the title of tyrant, and the victim be called a glorious martyr.
On 22 May, says Warkworth, the late King’s corpse was laid in a coffin and carried through the streets of London to St Paul’s where it lay in state for several days. ‘And his face was open that every man might see him, and in his lying he bled on the pavement there; and afterwards at the Black Friars was brought, and there he bled new and fresh.’ The people murmured at this, and the Great Chronicle reports that ‘the common fame then went that the Duke of Gloucester was not all guiltless’ of Henry’s death.
The chroniclers do not record where Margaret of Anjou spent the night of the 21st. However, on the following day she was certainly imprisoned in the Tower. Her reaction to the news of her husband’s death is not recorded either, but she did make a determined attempt to gain custody of his body, which was denied her. Before long, she received a letter from her grief-stricken father, King René: ‘My child, may God help thee with His counsels! For rarely is the aid of man tendered in such reverse of fortune.’ René himself had recently suffered a triple bereavement – his son, John of Calabria, his bastard daughter Blanche and his son-in-law Ferry de Vaudemont had all died within weeks of each other the previous year. ‘When you can spare a thought from your own sufferings,’ he wrote to Margaret, ‘think of mine. They are great, my daughter, yet would I console thee.’
Henry VI’s funeral service was conducted at the monastery of the Black Friars, after which his body was carried in a barge ‘suitably equipped with lamps fifteen miles up the Thames’ to Chertsey Abbey in Surrey where it was ‘honourably interred’ in the Lady Chapel.
‘There is many a great sore, many a perilous wound left unhealed,’ records the Parliament Roll of 1474, three years after the wars between Lancaster and York had ended. Croyland states that ‘this unhappy plague of division’ had spread ‘not only among princes and people, but even in every society, whether chapter, college or convent’. Many lords came out of the conflict facing financial ruin. ‘The slaughter of men was immense, for besides the dukes, earls, barons and distinguished warriors who were cruelly slain, multitudes almost innumerable of the common people died of their wounds. Such was the state of the kingdom.’
The Wars of the Roses did not in fact bring about the destruction of most of the mediaeval aristocracy, as this lament would seem to imply. Although thirty-eight peers perished, only seven noble families, not counting the royal houses, became extinct. And while the conflict undoubtedly led to the aggrandisement of some already ‘over-mighty’ subjects, other members of the aristocracy refused to become involved in it at all. Certainly the effect of the wars was to narrow the gap between the King and the magnates and gradually erode the royal authority, while the slaughter of so many lords and knights also signalled an end to the age of chivalry.
Tudor historians were fond of reminding their readers of the horrors of the Wars of the Roses, recounting how the realm had been plunged into a vicious civil war over a disputed crown that lasted more than thirty years. They spared no efforts to portray this as a grim period of violence, political anarchy and social decay. Edward Hall posed the rhetorical question, ‘What misery, what murder, and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the division and dissension of the renowned Houses of Lancaster and York, my wit cannot comprehend nor my tongue declare. For what noble man, what gentleman of any ancient stock or progeny, whose lineage hath not been infected and plagued by this unnatural division?’ The Elizabethan antiquarian, John Stow, referred to the Wars of the Roses as ‘all that heaving in and hurling out’, while Shakespeare wrote a cycle of plays about them, saying famously:
England hath long been mad and scarred herself,
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster.
Croyland, writing in 1486, viewed the Wars of the Roses primarily as a dynastic struggle that had its origins in York’s assertion of his claim to the throne. This became the accepted Tudor view, and proves that the tradition had a very early source. Polydore Vergil, Henry VII’s official historian, traced the origins of the conflict to the usurpation of Henry IV, but this was too simplistic a view and did not take account of the political decline of the 1440s and 1450s. Vergil had no difficulty in believing that God had visited the sins of Henry IV upon his descendant, Henry VI, yet he did not explain how this was to be reconciled with the triumphant career of Henry V.
Tudor historians were adepts at rewriting history. The dynasty they served had brought peace, firm government and prosperity to England, but its monarchs were still usurpers. A striking contrast had to be drawn, therefore, between the peaceful England of Tudor times and the political anarchy it had suffered under the later Plantagenets, the implication being that if Henry VII had not become king in 1485, the civil wars would probably have dragged on for much longer. More importantly, the subjects of the Tudor kings had to be reminded of what might happen if the crown came into dispute again.
There is certainly no doubt that violence and lawlessness flourished during the Wars of the Roses. Soldiers brutalised in the French wars behaved with a ferocity which their commanding officers were powerless to control, while some magnates were little better than sadistic ruffians. Thousands of men died horribly in battle, or were mercilessly butchered while trying to escape. Murder was often committed with impunity both on and off the battlefield.
Yet the wars were by no means continuous, as we have seen, nor did England experience many of the usual horrors of civil war, like those suffered in fifteenth-century France or seventeenth-century Britain. There were, at most, thirteen weeks of fighting in the thirty-two years covered by both of the Wars of the Roses, while the total amount of time spent campaigning amounted to approximately one year. The problems of keeping an army fed and watered meant that individual campaigns lasted for a matter of days or weeks, not months. Some of the battles were very short, and none lasted longer than a day. Most took place in open countryside and hardly affected life in the towns and villages. The conflict had very little effect upon the population at large, except on the rare occasions when a battle resulted in great loss of life that devastated a whole local community, as happened at Towton in 1461. This was why the behaviour of the Scots and men of the north on the Queen’s march south that year provoked such outrage. Relatively few civilians suffered attack or privation, and – with the exception of Stamford, St Albans and Ludlow – no town suffered a siege or a sacking. Nor did the castles, halls and manors of the aristocracy suffer greatly. Only the great defensive castles of the north became targets for military action.
The accounts of foreign visitors to England give the impression that the country appeared settled and prosperous in the second half of the fifteenth century, not torn by war. The architecture of the period reflects a trend of growing prosperity rather than a need to build defensively. Fortifications were no longer added as a matter of course to castles and manor houses, and moats and crenellations had become merely ornamental. Neither does the literature of the age reflect a preoccupation with the evils of civil war. This was because most of the population did not regard the Wars of the Roses as a civil war as such, but as a dispute between noble factions. Few English people really cared who sat on the throne, so long as he was able to govern effectively and maintain justice. The leaders of the political factions therefore used propaganda to sway public opinion, which was very fickle, and did their best to canvass the support of other magnates who, left to themselves, would have remained strictly neutral. In fact, the majority of peers, both spiritual and temporal, managed to avoid committing themselves wholeheartedly to either party, while some tended to wait and see which way a battle was going, and only went in to assist the winning side. Self-interest usually governed political loyalties.
Henry VI’s reign had been one of the most catastrophic in England’s history, yet after his death his reputation grew steadily. Tales of his piety and holy life spread rapidly, and were just as rapidly embellished. Within weeks of his death, pilgrims were hastening from all over the kingdom to pray at his tomb, many from the north of England where Lancastrian sympathies were still strong. It was said in those parts that Henry had died a martyr. Soon he was venerated as a saint, and 155 miracles were said to have taken place at his tomb, most of them cures for the sick. Croyland says that ‘the miracles which God worked in response to the prayers of those devoutly seeking his intercession are witness to his blameless life, the extent of his love for God and the Church, of his patience in adversity and his other outstanding virtues’. People forgot that Henry had failed them in nearly every way that mattered – as king, as warlord, and as the fount of justice – and remembered only his virtuous life and the fact that he had bequeathed to them two enduring monuments to his piety and love of learning – Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge.
In 1484, Richard III, apparently with the aim of making reparation for Henry’s murder, ordered his reburial to the south of the high altar in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Rous says that when the King’s body was exhumed after lying for thirteen years at Chertsey it was found to be virtually incorrupt. The face was skeletal and sweet-smelling – ‘certainly not from spices, since he was buried by his enemies and tormentors’ – a sure sign of sanctity. The body was reverently laid to rest in a vault beneath a plain stone slab near the tomb of Henry’s great adversary, Edward IV. In recognition of the common people’s devotion to ‘Saint’ Henry, King Richard ordered that his armour, robes and other possessions be displayed near the tomb as relics; Stow records that his crimson velvet cap was considered an effective cure for headaches. An iron alms box bearing a gothic ‘H’ was set up for pilgrims, and still remains in place today.
By Tudor times, Henry VI’s saintly reputation had grown immensely, and people forgot that he had been a weak king who was responsible for decades of misrule and the loss of England’s possessions in France. John Blacman’s memoir was written in this climate, and for centuries was accepted as a reliable account of Henry’s life. Only recently has its veracity been called into question. It was in fact written to support Henry VII’s campaign to have his uncle formally canonised; it would have been beneficial to the image of the new dynasty to have a Lancastrian saint among its forbears, but despite strenuous efforts on the part of Henry Tudor, the campaign was unsuccessful. In England, however, up until the Reformation, people continued to venerate Henry VI. As his cult spread, the room in the Tower in which he had met his end was converted into a shrine, and was also visited by pilgrims. The shrine was dismantled by Henry VIII’s commissioners in the 1530s, but ever since then, each year on the night of 21 May, the governors of Eton College have placed a sheaf of lilies and red roses on the traditional site of Henry’s murder.
Margaret of Anjou did not remain long in the Tower. Elizabeth Wydville pleaded with her husband to mitigate the severity of the former queen’s imprisonment, and Edward IV, who could never resist his wife’s importunings, soon ordered Margaret’s removal to the more congenial surroundings of Windsor Castle, where she remained under house arrest until 8 July 1471, when she moved to Wallingford Castle. This was an act of kindness on Edward’s part, for Wallingford was near Ewelme, the Oxfordshire home of Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, one of Margaret’s closest friends. Alice was appointed by the King to be her guardian and was paid five marks a week for her expenses.
In 1476, after the Duchess’s death, Margaret was ransomed by Louis XI and returned to France, where she was maintained by her father. After René’s death in 1480, she lived in very reduced circumstances, subsisting on a meagre pension provided by King Louis. She died in great poverty after a short unspecified illness on 25 August 1482 and was buried in Angers Cathedral.
Anne Neville became, in 1472, the wife of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to whom she bore one son, Edward of Middleham, who died in childhood. Two years after Richard became King, Anne herself died, possibly of tuberculosis or cancer, in 1485, at the age of twenty-nine.
George, Duke of Clarence was executed for treason in 1478; he died privately, in the Tower of London, probably – at his own request – by drowning in a butt of Malmsey wine. His wife, Isabel, had died in childbed in 1476.
After learning of Henry VI’s murder, Jasper Tudor fled to Henry Tudor in France, to begin fourteen years of exile. After Henry became King in 1485, Jasper was created Duke of Bedford and married Katherine Wydville, dying in 1495.
Sir John Fortescue was pardoned after he had written a treatise upholding Edward IV’s claim to the throne and abjuring his former writings; he was made a member of Edward’s Council and died around 1477-9. King Edward also pardoned Dr John Morton, the Earl of Ormonde, Sir Richard Tunstall, young Lord Clifford and Sir Henry Vernon.
From 1471 to 1483 Edward IV ruled England firmly and well, unchallenged by any. In 1473, the birth of another son, Richard, to Elizabeth Wydville made the House of York seem almost invincible. But when Edward died suddenly, in 1483, and his twelve-year-old son Edward V succeeded him, a power struggle erupted between the Duke of Gloucester, whom Edward had designated Protector of England, and the Wydville faction. Gloucester emerged the victor from this, imprisoned the boy king, deposed him, and had himself crowned Richard III, all within three months. He then almost certainly arranged for young Edward and his brother to be murdered in the Tower of London. This made him so unpopular that within two years both he and the House of York had been overthrown by Henry Tudor, who became King Henry VII after winning the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
‘Time has his revolutions,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Lord Chief Justice, Sir Ranulph Crew,
there must be a period and an end to all temporal things, finis rerum, an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is of this earth. Where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality.