by Dan Jones
Eventually, the cry went up to begin battle and the wet snowflakes were joined by a bloody blizzard of arrows, carried hard on the wind from the Yorkist archers under Lord Fauconberg. Some fire was also exchanged by gunners – men wielding primitive artillery which fired iron-and-lead shot of more than an inch in diameter. Even in the wind, the blasts from these hand-cannon must have been terrific, made all the more so by the occasional screams of the gunners whose weapons backfired and exploded in their hands.22
Seeing that in this exchange of fire the Yorkists had the wind at their backs, and being unwilling to stand in the storm and watch his men shot to death, the duke of Somerset gave the order to advance. The Lancastrians waded downhill towards the enemy, crashing into the vast line of the Yorkist army and beginning a long and exceptionally fierce battle, which would turn out to be the bloodiest ever fought on English soil. The whitened, undulating landscape of Towton plain was rent with the judder of pole-axe and sword blade into armour and flesh, the screams of wounded horses and dying men, the press of steaming bodies into one another, men falling and flailing and slipping as bodies piled high on top of one another. Orders had been given by Edward that lords should be killed and not captured, but the death toll was equally appalling among the well-born and the lowly. As the armies grappled and lashed out, the fronts swayed and began to pivot through forty-five degrees, so that from a starting position in which they were arrayed on an east–west line, by the afternoon they had swung round so that the Lancastrians were fighting on a north-east–south-west axis, with their backs to the flooded meadow of a deep waterway called Cock Beck. Their right flank was menaced by Yorkist archers and their left was now fighting at the bottom of a hill, having been driven hard round when the duke of Norfolk joined the fighting on the Yorkists’ right. In short, the Lancastrians were being driven into a wetland that swiftly became a deathly pool of blood: their only escape was to make their way uphill from the left flank and attempt to flee back towards Towton and Tadcaster. Doing so, however, meant scrambling up wet and churned-up turf with the blizzard on their backs. As they tried to flee they were mown down by the Yorkist cavalry, who swept over the open ground, cudgelling and lancing their enemies with abandon. Even those who made it past Towton suddenly found themselves trapped once more: before the battle the Lancastrians had broken the wooden bridge further up Cock Beck, and they were now penned in at the far end of the battle site. As the cavalry closed in on them, men threw off their armour and tried to wade or swim through the brisk water. Weary, wounded or half-frozen, they drowned by the dozen, until eventually the beck was so dammed with corpses that their colleagues could scramble to safety over what became known as the Bridge of Bodies.
With men dying in their thousands, the Lancastrian line dissolved by mid-afternoon, and the leaders took flight. The earl of Wiltshire, perhaps the greatest coward of his generation, had previously run away from the first battle of St Albans and the battle of Mortimer’s Cross. He brought his tally to three desertions by abandoning Towton, but this time his luck had run out. He made it to Newcastle before being captured and beheaded. Andrew Trollope and the earl of Northumberland were both cut down on the battlefield. The dukes of Somerset and Exeter ran for their lives and escaped; the earl of Devon also ran but was too badly injured to get beyond York, where he too was caught and executed. Behind them, the leaders’ abandonment of the field turned defeat into a devastating rout. On Edward’s orders, no mercy was shown in victory. Skulls later found on the battlefield showed the most horrific injuries: faces split down the bone, heads cut in half, holes punched straight through foreheads. Some died with more than twenty wounds to the head: the signs of frenzied slaughter by men whipped into a state of barbaric bloodlust. Some victims were mutilated: their noses and ears ripped off, fingers snipped from hands to remove rings and jewellery in the plunder of the dying. The field of Towton was known as the Bloody Meadow, and with good reason. On 7 April 1461, Bishop Neville of Exeter wrote to the bishop of Teramo in Flanders. He reported the events of the six weeks that had just passed, including the slaughter at St Albans, Ferrybridge and Towton, and estimated that twenty-eight thousand men had been killed at the latter. (The figure was repeated by Bishop Beauchamp of Salisbury in a letter of the same day.) ‘Alas!’ he wrote, ‘we are a race deserving of pity even from the French.’23
Indeed, it must have seemed to many in 1461 that all the fates that had befallen the French a generation previously, when Armagnacs fought Burgundians and the crown was tossed about and tussled over to the utter ruin of the realm, had now been visited on the islanders across the sea. England was ruled by deeds of savagery, the north country was drenched in blood, and most distressing of all, two kings were at large. Queen Margaret’s decision to hold back Henry VI and Prince Edward from the battle of Towton had proven a wise one, for even though the Lancastrians were decisively defeated, they were not quite exterminated as a royal line. They retreated to Scotland with a few surviving allies: the dukes of Somerset and Exeter, Lord Roos and the judge Sir John Fortescue. Other loyal Lancastrian lords, such as Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, soon joined them. They were, however, very much a rump court: militarily ruined, financially constrained and exhausted.
King Edward IV spent a month in the north mopping up resistance before returning to London in triumph in May, for the coronation that would set God’s seal on his accession to the crown. He would now claim not only to be king by right of blood, but to have had his claim vindicated in blood on the battlefield. An act of his first parliament, called to Westminster in November 1461, rehearsed the legal arguments against Henry VI’s kingship and put forward the righteous case for his own. By that time parliament was merely putting the legal stamp on what was already a political fact. For on Friday 26 June Edward had made a ceremonial entrance into the capital that had long supported his claim, and two days later he had been crowned as the thirteenth Plantagenet and first Yorkist king of England.
13 : The Noble and the Lowly
Edward IV was far from the youngest man to have ascended the English throne, but he was perhaps the most hastily prepared. At nineteen years old he had been raised as the eldest son of a great nobleman. He had studied hard, prayed diligently, learned to fight and dance, to speak courteously and to give his attention to the business of managing a great estate. But it was still some distance between growing up to become a duke and suddenly arriving as a crowned and anointed king of England. And yet, here he was: carried to the throne on the wave of his dead father’s ambition, his hands stained with the blood of his enemies.
Fortunately, much of the outward business of kingship came naturally to Edward. As a young man he was more than six feet tall and handsome if not pretty: surviving portraits capture narrow eyes and pursed lips above a prominent chin. Edward was greatly taken with the lavish dress, manners and courtly habits that were fashionable in Burgundy and elsewhere on the continent, and to match his grand appearance the new king was possessed of courtly charm allied with a military swagger. Although he had a fierce temper when goaded, he was generally ‘of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect’, wrote one contemporary, also recalling that the king ‘was so genial in his greeting, that if he saw a newcomer bewildered at his appearance and royal magnificence, he would give him courage to speak by laying a kindly hand upon his shoulder’.1 He had a sharp mind and a keen memory: the author of the extended English history known as the Crowland Chronicle Continuations frequently admired Edward’s ‘foresight’ and political acumen, and marvelled that he could recall the state and business of ‘almost all men, scattered over the counties of the kingdom … just as if daily they were in his sight’. Edward had uncommonly clear trust in his own judgement and the ability to inspire great loyalty in the men whom he picked to counsel him. And like many of the great Plantagenet kings before him – from Richard the Lionheart to Henry V – he had proven himself on the battlefield at a young age.
Many writers contemporary, or nearly contemporary, to Edward�
��s reign struggled to find faults with his person and his broad approach to government – with one exception. The new king was, it was frequently said, a debauched lecher. He was certainly known in his time to be fond of women, and it did not always matter whether they were attractive or not. Tongues wagged: the Italian clergyman, humanist and scholar Dominic Mancini, who visited England to write a contemporary history and saw his subjects at first hand, called Edward ‘licentious in the extreme’ and reported that the new king ‘pursued with no discrimination the married and the unmarried, the noble and the lowly’, while the Crowland continuator – although writing more than two decades after Edward’s accession – scratched his pen in sadness at the fact that such a talented and confident governor could also be ‘such a gross man so addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance and passion’.2 Even if we allow for the prudishness of the writers and for the fact that some of these judgements were more appropriate to the later years of Edward IV’s life than the perilous days during which he first seized his crown, the impression was consistent.
For the first three years of his reign Edward’s main concern was not sensuality but survival. In March 1461 God had smiled on his claim to kingship by blessing him with victory on the battlefield. But the Lord had not given him mastery of his kingdom. Rather, at the point when Edward first wore the crown, he was still essentially the head of a faction, a private lord who needed to build his public authority in order to claim the full loyalty of his subjects. Just as Henry Bolingbroke had found when he deposed Richard II and took the crown as Henry IV in 1399, a usurper was bound to pursue two apparently opposing strategies. He was obliged to prove that he would be an impartial ruler, able to defend the realm and offer justice to all his subjects, but at the same time he was obliged to reward and favour those men who had helped him take the throne in the first place. This was no easy task at the best of times. And it was far from the only issue that faced Edward: there were also very pressing problems of violent public disorder caused by more than a decade of intermittent rebellion, plotting and civil war, and the threat of attack by foreign powers eager to seize on England’s moment of desolation and distress. Charles VII of France died from longstanding infections in his leg and jaw on 22 July 1461, less than a month after Edward’s coronation, but his hot-headed and belligerent son, who succeeded as Louis XI, was sure to want to discomfit the new English king as much as possible. On top of this Edward had to build from scratch a working government, staffed with men whom he could trust not only to be loyal but to be competent. Finally, he had to consider his dynastic duty: to father enough children to be sure that the future was secure and to discourage the schemes of anyone who had watched his rise and now considered the crown a bauble to be contested by anyone with old royal blood in their veins. It was a daunting task.
Edward began with the Lancastrians. A good many of the leaders had been wiped out at Towton, but a hard core of the committed still survived. Several coastal castles in Northumberland were held by Lancastrian captains, and it took a long and concerted campaign of siege warfare to winkle them out. Queen Margaret had taken Henry VI and Prince Edward back into Scotland, and for the next two years she attempted to raise support for a new invasion, allying herself first with the government of James III, and subsequently seeking finance and military aid from Louis XI. She managed to launch a land and sea invasion of northern England during the spring and summer of 1463, linking up with the defenders of the northern castles, but ultimately she was repelled and forced to flee England for good. While Henry VI remained in Scotland, Margaret and Edward were compelled to live the rest of the decade in exile on the continent. Jasper Tudor, the king’s half-brother who had been stripped of his earldom of Pembroke by act of attainder, served as a go-between, travelling back and forth between France and Scotland, while also attempting to raise an invasion fleet and concentrating his efforts on harassing the Welsh coast. A small group of other diehard Lancastrians, including Henry duke of Exeter and Sir John Fortescue, remained with the queen in impoverished exile. But their efforts to return were firmly resisted, and in October 1463 Edward secured a truce with France which forbade Louis XI to engage with Lancastrian plots, effectively dashing all hopes of a swift return.
Meanwhile, sympathisers who remained actively defiant in England were rooted out. Although only a tiny number were attainted in parliament for their part in the fighting of 1455–61, there was still a move to crush the most implacable. Sweeping legal commissions visited rebellious towns and imposed exemplary justice on townsfolk about the realm. In some places, the severed heads of traitors and rebels were left to rot on poles for up to six months. Many of these heads belonged to the low-born and unfortunate, but others fell from noble shoulders. They included that of the ageing and ill John de Vere, earl of Oxford, who had been notable for his neutrality in all the armed conflicts to date. But in February 1462 Oxford was arrested with his eldest son Aubrey and tried for treason, for plotting against Edward’s life. The two men were executed within a week of one another on Tower Hill, on ‘a scaffold of four foot [in] height … that all men might see’.3
Edward’s early efforts in quelling Lancastrian rebellions rested heavily on Warwick and the Nevilles. Warwick was entrusted with defending the north and spent nearly three years bringing it to obedience, fighting a wearisome border war in which great castles like Alnwick, Norham and Bamburgh were reduced with ‘great ordinance and guns’ and the resilience of the rebels and their Scottish allies was slowly but surely ground down. In reward for these duties and his previous long and dangerous service, lands and offices taken from the defeated Lancastrians were given to Warwick on a massive scale. He was appointed great chamberlain of England, admiral of England and warden of the Cinque Ports and Dover Castle for life; he also retained his invaluable post of captain of Calais. He became warden of both the east and west marches in the north, making him the sole military authority below the king. He became steward of the whole duchy of Lancaster. He inherited all his mother’s lands when she died in 1462. He took command of huge swathes of territory, particularly in the north, where he was awarded former Percy estates. He was confirmed, in short, as the wealthiest and the pre-eminent nobleman in the realm.
His family shared in the spoils. Warwick’s uncle William, Lord Fauconberg was raised to earl of Kent and John Neville was created Lord Montague (and subsequently earl of Northumberland, the old Percy title). George Neville, the loyal bishop of Exeter who had preached Edward IV’s accession at St Paul’s in 1461, was repaid by appointment as chancellor and translation to the archbishopric of York, a promotion he celebrated with a dazzling feast at which six thousand guests were treated to several days of gluttonous roistering at Cawood Castle in Yorkshire: more than one hundred oxen and twenty-five thousand gallons of wine were said to have been enjoyed, in the presence of the king’s youngest brother, Richard duke of Gloucester. The Nevilles had backed the Yorks all the way to the crown, and they received their thanks in dazzling abundance.
Of course, other noble families gained too as Edward IV set about expanding his political base. The Bourchier family was rewarded for loyalty as Henry, elder brother of Thomas Bourchier, archbishop of Canterbury, was created earl of Essex. In Edward’s own family it was his young brother and heir, George, who profited most from the Yorkist victory. George was made duke of Clarence and given a large bloc of former Lancastrian lands, including the late Edmund Tudor’s earldom of Richmond. In Wales, William, Lord Herbert was given most of Jasper Tudor’s confiscated estates, custody of Edmund Tudor’s son and heir, Henry Tudor, and virtually uncontested power in the principality. And in the household, the main beneficiary was William Hastings, who became Lord Hastings, chamberlain of the household, gatekeeper to the king’s presence and will. Other new men were also cultivated: the west-country landowner Humphrey Stafford became an important ally, as did the Bedfordshire knight Sir John Wenlock – both Stafford and Wenlock were raised to the baronage for their friendship a
nd service. None, however, enjoyed so much prestige and royal favour as the Nevilles.
Or so it seemed. Then in 1464, something extraordinary happened. Among all these old and new families coalescing in a pool of political support for the Yorkist king, there arrived another family – one who would rise to outstrip almost every other in their power and prestige, despite extremely humble roots. They were the Woodvilles, and their fortunes would be yoked to those of the house of York for the next two decades.
*
Autumn was drawing in and the festival of Michaelmas was approaching: a holiday that coincided with the end of the harvest, which all of England rose to celebrate with merrymaking, dining, drinking and good cheer. It was the middle of September 1464 and the lords of England gathered at Reading Abbey to hold a conference with their king. They met in the glorious abbey chapel, a setting intimately connected with the ancient history of the English crown, not least since it was the resting place of the great Norman king and lawgiver Henry I and his second wife and queen, Adeliza of Louvain.4 There were several political issues at hand – not least among them a controversial recoinage, by which the value of England’s money would be slashed by around a quarter and the Crown would make a handsome profit by reminting England’s coins. The most pressing concern of all, however, was the most personal. The lords had gathered to discuss Edward’s marriage.
