by Dan Jones
Evening was drawing in when the Yorkists began to fire their cannon towards the royal lines. These were the preliminary exchanges of a battle that was intended to be fought the following day: 13 October, St Edward’s Day, the prince of Wales’s birthday and the most auspicious day of the whole year for English kingship. To York and the Nevilles it seemed that there was only one way that the day would be marked: with their armies scattered, their lives imperilled and their families put on the road to utter ruin. York’s own family was in close quarter at Ludlow: his seventeen-year-old son Edward earl of March was at his side, so too his second son, the sixteen-year-old Edmund earl of Rutland. Behind them in the castle were Duchess Cecily and her two younger boys, George, aged nine, and Richard, who had just celebrated his seventh birthday. Would the king, spurred by his vengeful wife, spare them, if it came to that?
Defeatism was seeping into the Yorkist ranks. At some point during the evening, while the irregular boom of cannon echoed over the black water of the river Teme, one of Warwick’s captains, a Calais soldier called Andrew Trollope, led his hardened troops out of the Yorkist camp and over to the royal side to submit to the king, taking with him both valuable fighting men and invaluable military intelligence. Now faced with what amounted to certain obliteration, in the dead of night York and his leading allies sneaked out of camp, back to Ludlow Castle, leaving their army standing oblivious in their wake as they rode hard away from the battlefield. It was a highly dishonourable thing to do, but the only means by which they could save themselves. From Shropshire they scattered ‘in to diverse parties … beyond the sea, for the more surety of their personnes’.14 York and his son Rutland made for the Welsh coast, breaking bridges as they went, before taking boats across the sea to Ireland. The Nevilles, meanwhile, fled in great peril to the west country, taking with them the young Edward earl of March. From Devon they took ship to Guernsey, from where they returned to Warwick’s haven in Calais.
They had saved their skins but at great cost to their reputations and honour. Their men, who rose for the anticipated battle, instead found themselves surrendering and petitioning for royal forgiveness. Queen Margaret, standing behind the royal lines, no doubt took great satisfaction in this moment. Four years on from the debacle of St Albans, her enemies had finally scurried from the royal standard like frightened mice. ‘Every lord in England at the time durst not disobey the Queen,’ wrote one chronicler.15 All that remained was to return to Coventry and prepare for the November parliament, where their legal destruction, and the desolation of their families, could be completed.
Up in Ludlow Castle, another great lady of the realm viewed events unfolding with growing alarm. Cecily Neville, duchess of York, had seen her husband and second son run in one direction while her brother, nephew and eldest son (Salisbury, Warwick and March) hastened in another. On 13 October she watched from the castle as royal troops broke into the town and began its sack. It was a scene that would be repeated all across the kingdom in the coming months, as Yorkist properties were despoiled and their tenants harassed. Cecily had seen enough of the violent politics of Normandy, Ireland and England during her marriage to know that she was in terrible danger. And most immediately she had to consider the safety of the two males of her kin who had not run from her: her young boys, George and Richard. As the sack of Ludlow concluded she walked out of the castle gates, taking the children with her. A day of terror and confusion had seen some men staggering drunkenly about the streets, having robbed the taverns of their ‘pipes and hogs-heads of wine’, while others stole ‘bedding, clothes, and other stuff, and defiled many women’.16 The grand wife of the vanquished duke walked through the streets of the ransacked town, her sons by her side. They walked as far as the overturned marketplace, in the shadow of the castle walls, and then came to a halt: the remnants of a great family, throwing themselves on the mercy of the crown. While Ludlow ‘was robbed to the bare walles’, Cecily, George and Richard simply stood and waited for whatever fate was to meet them.17
11 : Suddenly Fell Down the Crown
Nearly two thousand men poured onto the ships that set sail from Calais on a summer’s day in late June 1460. They were headed for the coast of Kent, to Sandwich, the sheltered port a few miles north of Dover, whose long, sandy stretch of coastline made landing a large force of men and munitions a straightforward task. The journey across the Channel was rapid, and the soldiers who piled aboard the invading vessels were something of a crack force: ‘a strong and a mighty navy’, as one chronicler put it.1 Their leader and commander was the earl of Warwick.
For nearly eleven months, since the flight from Ludford Bridge, Warwick had turned Calais into a bristling citadel for English dissidents and opponents of Queen Margaret. There were plenty to be found. As had been expected, in the dying months of 1459 the queen had moved against her enemies with indignation and spite. An act of attainder had been passed at a parliament held in St Mary’s Priory in Coventry before Christmas – a gathering that would later be nicknamed the ‘Parliament of Devils’ – which attempted the utter legal and financial ruin of York and his sons, and a whole raft of their friends, servants, associates and allies. The attainder had been introduced with an absurdly propagandising preamble, in which the duke of York was painted as a scheming, ungrateful monster, ‘whose false and traitorous imaginations, conspiracies, feats and diligent labours born up with colourable lies’ amounted to the worst deeds that ‘ever did any subject to his sovereign lord’, while Henry VI was cast not only as a generous sovereign whose trust had been betrayed and life endangered (at St Albans), but as a vigorous soldier who valiantly faced down his enemies on the battlefield, and whose addresses to his subjects could be described as ‘so witty, so knightly, so manly’.2
The penalty of attainder amounted to legal death. It stripped its victims of ‘all their estates, honoures and dignities, which they or any of them hath within this your realm of England, and within Wales and Ireland’, including ‘all honours, castles, lordships, manors, landes, tenements, rents, reversions, annuities, offices, fees, advowsons, fee-farms, inheritances and other possessions’. It was aimed not only at York and his sons Edward earl of March and Edmund earl of Rutland, but also at Salisbury and Warwick and their noble supporter John, Lord Clinton. A whole raft of other Yorkist servants, retainers and associates were also swept up, including Sir Walter Devereux, Sir William Oldhall and Salisbury’s wife, Countess Alice. John de la Pole, who had inherited the title of duke of Suffolk from his father, was said to have been demoted to the rank of earl for the ‘crime’ of being married to York’s daughter Elizabeth.3
Although a few culpable figures escaped ruin – Thomas, Lord Stanley was forgiven his refusal to engage at Blore Heath – by and large the queen embarked on a severe and vengeful campaign against all York’s affiliates. Their lands and titles were swept into royal possession, their officials dismissed and replaced, and the administration of the confiscated estates given over to men of longstanding obedience to the crown and court. High among the beneficiaries were men of the king’s immediate family. Owen Tudor was given a pension of £100 a year, to be paid for the rest of his life out of manors seized from Lord Clinton. Jasper Tudor, who had spent the last four years representing the king’s authority in south Wales, was given the rights of constable, steward and chief forester to York’s rich and strategically crucial lordship of Denbigh, along with rights of military recruitment over virtually the whole of Wales to help him seize Denbigh Castle from its disgruntled Yorkist keepers.
Yet for all their determination to destroy the Yorkists by law, the queen and her government found themselves unable to reach their enemies in person. York and his second son Edmund were safe in Ireland, and although James earl of Wiltshire – a spineless creature of the queen who ranked among the men most hated by the Yorkists – was appointed lieutenant of Ireland, he could not physically take up his role thanks to the support that York enjoyed across the sea. The situation was more or less mirrored in Calais, w
here Warwick now enjoyed pre-eminence and protection from all the harm that so many in England would have dearly loved to do to him.
Now thirty-one, Warwick had not come to Calais to live in fearful exile. He was a veteran soldier, a highly regarded and popular leader and a shrewd politician who used his aristocratic pedigree on the continent to recruit allies ranging from the duke of Burgundy to envoys of the papal court. With his father Salisbury and his nephew, York’s son Edward earl of March, Warwick had spent the year regrouping and rearming.
Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset had been sent by Queen Margaret to eject the rebels and take up the captaincy of Calais for himself, but Somerset could get no further than the neighbouring town of Guînes, from where his repeated assaults were easily repulsed. Meanwhile, piratical Yorkist raiding parties arrived like Vikings on the beaches of Kent, attacking towns and kidnapping or murdering royal captains. On two occasions Warwick’s men stole and scuppered ships on the Kentish coast that the Crown was assembling there specifically to use against him. In one particularly daring raid, the loyalist lord Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, and his son, Anthony Woodville, were sent to Sandwich with instructions to launch an attack on Calais, only to be abducted by Warwick’s men and taken back to the garrison as prisoners. Alongside this daring guerrilla campaign, Warwick bravely kept up communications with York and Rutland in Ireland: indeed, in March 1460 the earl managed to sail along the entire coast of southern England and Wales and hold a conference with York in Waterford on the south coast of Ireland, where the two rebel camps discussed their return to England.
Warwick, March and Salisbury landed at Sandwich on 26 June and found the town readied for their arrival. An advance party under Salisbury’s brother Lord Fauconberg had stormed the royal defences the previous day, stealing the town’s weapons cache and summarily beheading the unlucky royal captain Osbert Mundford, who happened to be in command. The Yorkists had sent ahead of them their now customary manifesto, protesting absolute loyalty to the king and rehearsing their condemnation of the Crown’s poverty, the absence of justice and the failure of the king’s household to ‘to live upon his own livelihood’ (i.e. to be funded by the king’s private revenue, rather than relying on taxation). They added an accusation that ever since Humphrey duke of Gloucester had been ‘murdered’ at Bury in 1447 it had been ‘conspired, to have destroyed and murdered the said duke of York’, along with his issue ‘of the royal blood’. Rather than directly attacking the king or queen, scathing criticism was reserved for Wiltshire, Shrewsbury and Beaumont, the lords who had replaced the old duke of Somerset as the object of the Yorkists’ scorn.4 The manifesto broke little new ground either in tone or substance. The Yorkists rightly recognised that the Crown’s popular support was strongest in the midlands, the north-west and Wales; the rumble of disaffection that had led Kent and the south-east into open rebellion during Jack Cade’s heyday had never wholly faded, and could easily be stirred up with a rabble-rousing publication espousing the cause of York.
By 2 July Warwick and his men were in London, with thousands of supporters streaming to their side from across southern England. To the relief of the mayor and aldermen of London, who had seen the city turned upside down by rampaging rebel armies enough times over the preceding decade, the Yorkists stayed in the capital for only around forty-eight hours before drawing up into two large divisions: the first led by Fauconberg and the second headed by Edward and Warwick. They tramped north at pace to confront the king.
Fauconberg took with him a distinguished, if extremely pompous and slightly absurd ecclesiastic: Francesco Coppini, the bishop of Terni. Coppini had been appointed as papal legate to Henry VI, with a mandate to recruit England to a crusade against the Turks, but after meeting Warwick in Calais, he had become a very enthusiastic Yorkist partisan and propagandist. Shortly before leaving London for the march north, Coppini published at St Paul’s a colourful open letter to Henry VI, emphasising the supposed ‘obedience and loyalty’ of the Yorkists and damning their enemies as ‘clerks and ministers of the devil’. He issued the starkest warnings to the king and government, forecasting ‘the danger and ruin of your state’ if they failed to come to terms with Warwick and his allies. Those that ‘close their ears like deaf vipers, woe to them and also to your Majesty,’ wrote Coppini. ‘The danger is imminent and does not brook delay.’ He was absolutely right.
By 7 July the Yorkists’ two columns were approaching the midlands. The speed at which they had moved took the court at Coventry entirely by surprise. Henry and Queen Margaret had no choice but to go out and meet the rebels. They rode south rattled and under-strength. There was no time for Henry earl of Northumberland or John, Lord Clifford to reach the royal army with their men, and while the king and queen were attended by great lords like Humphrey duke of Buckingham, the earl of Shrewsbury, Viscount Beaumont and a healthy smattering of Percys, the Yorkists had attracted far more noble support than at any previous foray into the field. Their supporters included John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, who had for many years been inclined to York’s cause without ever before fully committing himself to military action; Warwick could count among his men John, Lord Audley, the son and heir of the leader who was slain at Blore Heath by Salisbury. The Yorkists were also accompanied by a large group of the most important churchmen in the realm: Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, the legate Coppini and the bishops of London, Exeter, Lincoln, Salisbury, Ely and Rochester.
The two sides met on 10 July in the meadows outside Northampton, on the south bank of the river Nene. It was a miserably wet day, with rain pounding from the sky and churning up the turf as it was trampled over by thousands of boots and hoofs: horrible weather for fighting, not least since the water ruined the royal guns. Nevertheless, the duke of Buckingham, who was given command of the royal forces as the king and queen hung back, refused to negotiate. He lined his men up between a slight bend in the river and the nearby Delapré Abbey and prepared to give battle. The bishops retreated to a safe distance to watch.
What they witnessed was not, in overall numbers, an especially bloody battle. But within half an hour of the first exchanges, the royal forces were dealt a massive and devastating blow. Their men were divided into three groupings: Buckingham leading the left flank, Shrewsbury and Beaumont in the centre, and Lord Grey of Ruthin on the right. Early in the battle Grey decided to defect, bringing his men over to the Yorkist side, where Fauconberg, Warwick and March held command. The result was total confusion among the king’s army. Battered by the rain, they abandoned their discipline, and soldiers began to desert, running for Northampton, with several drowning in the Nene under the weight of their provisions and armour. As panic and chaos descended, Warwick’s men followed the ruthless tactics that had served them well six years before at St Albans. Warwick himself had called across the field that ‘no man shuld lay hand upon the king nor on the common people, but only on the lords, knights and squires’.5 Thus the rank and file were spared and hit squads moved around the battlefield, cutting down the captains. By the end, only around three hundred men lay slain on the field, out of more than ten thousand who had been arrayed for the fight. But among the dead were Buckingham, Beaumont, Shrewsbury and Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, all hunted out and killed where they stood. The whole operation took less than half an hour. While the butchering of the lords was taking place, the king was captured, as helpless in the field as he had been in 1455. He was taken first to Delapré Abbey, then on to London, no longer a puppet of his wife, but a prisoner of the earl of Warwick and his allies.
*
Cecily Neville, duchess of York had been scooped up at Ludlow following the battle of Ludford Bridge and taken with her sons George and Richard to a place of relatively genteel confinement: they were sent to stay with Cecily’s sister Anne, the wife of Humphrey duke of Buckingham. It was a favour granted when, strictly, one was not due. Cecily had been awarded one thousand marks a year to compensate for the loss of her husband’s income and to offer re
lief to ‘her and her infants who had not offended against the king’.6 The confinement was perhaps not entirely warm – one writer heard that Anne kept her younger sister ‘full straight [with] many a great rebuke’ – but under the circumstances she was treated well. Cecily was still with Anne in the summer of 1460, when the awful news arrived of Buckingham’s death by the hand of Warwick – who was, of course, both women’s nephew. In some senses this sort of thing was inevitable, for the Nevilles were a huge and broadly married dynasty, their bloodline woven across the divide in English politics. But it still must have felt to the two sisters, who were only divided by a year in age, that their family was tearing both itself and England apart.
After the battle of Northampton Cecily and her sons were released from their house arrest. With the king now in Warwick’s keep, it had become safe for Richard duke of York to return once again from Ireland, a journey that had been too perilous earlier in the summer, due to royal control of Wales, the marches and the north-west. York landed at Redbank, near Chester, on or around 8 September. But as he came, it was clear that something was different about him. In his absence his allies had fought successfully for their party to regain control of the king. They could have expected the duke, their talisman and figurehead, to try his hand once more at governing England as chief councillor or protector. Instead they found him angling for another position entirely.
