by Dan Jones
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‘On Holy Saturday in Easter week,’ wrote a chronicler of the time, Edward ‘quitted the city with his army, and, passing slowly on, reached the town of Barnet, a place ten miles distant from the city; and there pitched his camp, on the eve of the day of our Lord’s resurrection.’22 There were two kings in the army, for Edward had brought Henry VI with him. It was hardly likely that Henry would have escaped, or even conceived of escaping from the Tower of London. But his presence in Edward’s lines was vital, for marching in the other direction, directly towards them on the road from St Albans, came the earl of Warwick. He had finally left Coventry, ‘calling himself lieutenant of England and so constituted by the pretensed authority of King Henry’.23 Henry’s physical presence on the other side rendered this claim manifestly false.
The two armies made first contact as the light was fading on Saturday afternoon, when Warwick’s scouts were intercepted and chased by Edward’s men. With the sun setting, there was no hope of a fight that day, but the two sides were virtually within sight of one another. Both camped on the open ground north of Barnet. The damp, cold night air flashed and boomed with fire sprayed from the muzzles of Warwick’s cannon, aimed badly in the darkness and flinging shot safely over the heads of the kings’ men.
Dawn broke around four o’clock on Easter Sunday. A great mist hung over the ground, clouding the short distance between the two armies and obscuring ‘the sight of either other’. But almost all present – not least the veterans of the battle of Towton – had fought in worse. No sooner had the sun’s thin light come up than Edward ‘committed his cause and quarrel to Almighty God’, raised his banners, ordered his trumpeters to blow and charged his men forward against the blaze of the enemy artillery. 24 The reckoning had begun.
The royal army was commanded by Edward, with Lord Hastings on the left flank and Richard duke of Gloucester leading the right. Opposite them were Oxford, Montague and Exeter, with the earl of Warwick commanding from the rear. The two armies were misaligned, so that Gloucester’s men heavily outnumbered Exeter’s at the eastern end of the battlefield, while Hastings was hobbled in his fight against Oxford on the west. Hastings in particular took terrible losses, his division routed and chased back in the direction of London, carrying the false but terrifying news that Warwick had triumphed, capturing Edward and killing Clarence and Gloucester.
It was not so. Both sides’ guns were nullified by the thick fog, and the battle raged hand to hand, ‘cruel and mortal’. Edward fought in the centre of it all, his vision obscured so badly that he, like the rest of his men, could ‘see but a little from him’. Nevertheless, he ‘manly, vigorously and valiantly assailed’ his enemies and ‘with great violence, beat and bore down afore him all that stood in his way … first on that one hand, and then on that other hand … so that nothing might stand in the sight of him’.25
While Edward was accustomed to fighting on foot, Warwick was said by one chronicler to prefer to run with his men into battle before mounting on horseback, ‘and if he found victory inclined to his side, he charged boldly among them; if otherwise he took care of himself in time and provided for his escape’.26 At Barnet, however, he was harangued by his brother Montague, who insisted that he should demonstrate the Neville family’s courage by fighting on foot and sending his horses away. It was to be his undoing. After several hours of fighting the battle lines had wheeled ninety degrees, and the positions of the two armies grew very confused. The earl of Oxford, returning from his pursuit of Hastings’s men, arrived back on the misty battlefield and attacked what he thought were Edward’s rear lines. In fact he was encountering Montague’s men. In the mist and the press of battle, the Neville retinue apparently mistook the Oxford badge – a star – for Edward’s sun, and immediately turned their guns on their own allies.27 The cry of ‘Treason’ went up around the Lancastrian–Neville army and its order collapsed. In the confusion Warwick turned to scramble from the field and save himself. But on foot he was fatally hampered. By the time he had found a horse and set off in the direction of St Albans, there were Yorkist men in pursuit. Warwick was driven into a little wood at a fork in the road, where he was taken prisoner and killed before he could be brought up to Edward IV. Behind him on the battlefield Warwick left his brother John, Marquess Montague to be ‘slain … in plain battle, and many other knights, squires, noblemen, and other’.28
It was all over by eight o’clock on Easter morning. The battlefield was strewn with ten thousand spent arrows.29 The earl of Oxford fled the field and escaped to Scotland. Exeter was left for dead on the battlefield, but was eventually discovered by a servant, dragged from the field towards London and spirited into the sanctuary at Westminster. Later he was taken out of sanctuary and imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained for four years.
Edward lost his allies Lord Cromwell, Lord Saye and Sir William Blount in the fighting; his brother Gloucester and brother-in-law Lord Scales were both seriously injured and thousands more lay dead on the field on both sides. Those who staggered the ten miles back to London were seen arriving with their horses lame and faces bandaged, some having had their noses cut off in the fighting. ‘All men say that there was never in a hundred years a fiercer battle in England than this,’ wrote one well-connected foreign correspondent.30 There was no doubt that Edward had won an astonishing victory. St George, the Virgin and all the saints in heaven, wrote the official chronicler of the battle, had adjudged Edward’s ‘quarrel to be true and rightwise’. To advertise this fact, by the king’s order Warwick and Montague’s bodies were brought to London ‘in two chests, and were set upon the stones in the body of the church of St Paul’s, lying therein naked, except for a cloth tied around the private parts of either, so that everyone in London and others might see them, which many thousands did’.31
Just one enemy remained. On 16 April word reached the king that Queen Margaret, her son Prince Edward, his wife Anne Neville and many others, including Lord Wenlock, had finally found a favourable wind from Normandy and had landed on the south coast at Weymouth with seventeen ships, and had been greeted by their allies Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and John Courtenay, earl of Devon. For all the death and destruction that had been caused, it seemed as though there might be yet more to come. Foreign diplomats, receiving their news piecemeal across the Channel, shook their heads and marvelled at England’s topsy-turvy politics. ‘I wish the country and the people were plunged deep in the sea, because of their lack of stability, for I feel like one going to the torture when I write about them, and no one ever hears twice alike about English affairs,’ wrote Ambassador Bettini in a letter home to Milan. One thing was certain: the kingdom was not safe yet.
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The Lancastrian army struggled through the inhospitable land north of Gloucester on the eastern bank of the river Severn: ‘a foul country, all in lanes and stony ways, betwixt woods and without any good refreshing’. It was Friday 3 May, and some of them – including their leaders Queen Margaret and Prince Edward – had been travelling for more than three weeks. Their enemy, a rival royal army under the leadership of King Edward IV, had been in pursuit for several days. Both armies were now heading for the town of Tewkesbury, where there was a crossing in the river that would allow the chase to continue on the other side, with all of Wales opening up beyond. The troops on both sides were weary. Their leaders pushed them urgently onwards. The fight, when it came, was likely to be final.
Margaret and Prince Edward had landed in England on Easter Sunday, the same day that the slaughter was unfolding at the battle of Barnet. They had immediately begun raising troops, sending requests to supporters calling for ‘all such fellowship as you can make in your most defensible array’, against ‘Edward Earl of March the King’s great Rebel our Enemy’.32 The call was answered: large numbers of men had flocked to the Lancastrian standard from Devon and Cornwall. They formed a dangerous, undisciplined army that terrorised the towns they visited as Margaret pressed them northwards, marching thro
ugh Somerset towards the Cotswolds, in the hope either of meeting up in Wales with Jasper Tudor, who might provide them with loyal soldiers from the principality, or of reaching Lancashire, ‘where great numbers of men skilled in archery were to be found’.33 As they went, Queen Margaret kept up a stream of cheerfully outrageous propaganda, sending word to the king of France that ‘the Earl of Warwick was not dead, as reported, but he had been wounded in the fight with King Edward and had withdrawn to a secret and solitary place to get well of his wounds and sickness’, and that Prince Edward was ‘in London with a very large following of men and with the favour and assistance of the greater part of the common people and citizens’.34
Barely having enjoyed his victory at Barnet, Edward IV had been forced to scramble for another army, which he assembled at Windsor on 24 April, the day after St George’s Day and the annual royal feast held to commemorate the foundation of the Order of the Garter. Spies had informed him of the Lancastrians’ movements, so Edward had set off in pursuit of his enemies, heading north-west to try and cut them off in the Cotswolds. He had been in Cirencester on 29 April, as Margaret’s army approached Bath. Thereafter the two armies had tracked each other for the best part of a week.
On 3 May, a blisteringly hot day, as the Lancastrians struggled through the foul country by the riverbank towards Tewkesbury, Edward had flogged his chasing army a full thirty-one miles in a twelve-hour hike. The paucity of supplies in the countryside made supporting one army difficult, and two armies impossible. Thus Edward’s men had covered their ground without stopping once for food and water – there was ‘ne so much as drink for their horses, save in one little brook’, wrote one chronicler.35 It was an astonishing piece of leadership to have moved around five thousand hungry, thirsty men so far, so fast. But Edward managed it, and with his two brothers by his side, along with Lord Hastings, John duke of Norfolk and his stepson Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset and many other noblemen, he was able to close in on the Lancastrians with his usual certainty of purpose. Throughout the day, his scouts watched the enemy army, travelling ‘evermore … within five or six miles’.36 They camped near Tewkesbury in the afternoon on 3 May, ‘so extremely fatigued with the labour of marching and thirst that they could proceed no further’.37 Queen Margaret’s army arrived at Tewkesbury at four o’clock on the same afternoon. They, too, were exhausted from many days and miles of punishing marching. The two sides made camp around three miles away from each other, knowing full well what the next day would bring.
Early in the morning the following day, Saturday 4 May, Edward donned his armour and divided his army into three divisions under the same leadership that had prevailed at Barnet – himself, Hastings and the brilliant young Gloucester, who was now given command of the vanguard. Then he ‘displayed his banners, did blow up the trumpets; committed his cause and quarrel to Almighty God … the Virgin Mary, the glorious martyr Saint George, and all the saints and advanced directly upon his enemies’.38 The Lancastrians were arrayed under Prince Edward (assisted by Lord Wenlock and Sir John Langstrother, the prior of St John), Edmund duke of Somerset and John Courtenay, earl of Devon. Queen Margaret was some distance from the battlefield, perhaps watching events from Tewkesbury Abbey, which sat beyond a meadow and a couple of fishponds north of the Lancastrian lines. The battleground was uneven and pitted with obstacles: a road separated the two armies, and the ground between them contained ‘deep dykes, [and] so many hedges, trees and bushes’. It was, said one writer, ‘a right evil place to approach’.
Edward began his assault with a hail of arrows and gunshot – a ‘right-a-sharp shower’ –which was returned in kind. Fire was concentrated on the Lancastrian vanguard under the duke of Somerset, and ‘his fellowship was sore annoyed’. They refused to stand firm beneath the hail of deadly missiles until eventually the duke was forced to order a charge on the Yorkist lines. His men ran down the hill on which they had been arrayed, heading directly for the middle of Edward’s army, rather than for Gloucester’s vanguard, against whom they were most directly aligned. The troops crashed into each other, Somerset’s men fighting ‘right fiercely’ before ‘the King, full manly, set for the even upon them’ and began to push the attack back up the hill.
Before battle started Edward had detached two hundred pikemen and sent them to a nearby wood, instructing them to scout for a Lancastrian ambush. If they found nothing, they were to return to the battlefield ‘as they thought most behovefull’ and ‘to employ themselves in the best wise as they could’. It was a tactical masterstroke. As Somerset’s men were bowled back up the hill towards their own lines ‘with great violence’, Edward’s detachment of spearmen attacked them from the side, sending them into total disarray. Their discipline dissolved and Somerset’s whole division was scattered into the meadow and fields, ‘where they best hoped to escape the danger’. Just as at Towton, the meadow ran with blood as the fight became a rout: tired, panic-stricken men run down and hacked to pieces.
Somerset’s failure seems to have precipitated the collapse of the whole Lancastrian army. Lord Wenlock was killed. So was the earl of Devon and Somerset’s brother, John Beaufort. Most devastating of all, Prince Edward was cut down in the first battle he ever fought, ‘fleeing to the town-wards and slain in the field’. The chronicler Warkworth heard that the prince had died crying for succour from his brother-in-law George duke of Clarence.39 As their leaders were butchered, the Lancastrian captains and troops scattered from the field. Those who escaped death in the meadow fled either for the abbey or for the numerous churches of the surrounding countryside, hoping to find sanctuary. Not all of them would be so lucky.
The battle was decisive. Edward had ‘at last gained a glorious victory’.40 And just as at Towton he was determined to secure that victory with bloody swiftness. The king marched directly from the battlefield to Tewkesbury Abbey, where Somerset and others were sheltering under the protection of sanctuary. According to Warkworth, Edward walked into the abbey church ‘with his sword’ in his hand, only to be stopped by a priest holding the holy sacrament, who demanded that a royal pardon should be issued to the lords who were hiding there. Edward appears to have consented, and ordered the burial of those who had fallen in battle on the abbey’s consecrated ground ‘without any quartering or defouling [of ] their bodies’. Two days later, though, Somerset, Sir John Langstrother, Sir Hugh Courtenay and others were taken out of the abbey by force, and given into the custody of Gloucester as the constable of England, and Norfolk in his capacity as marshal. Gloucester’s court found them all guilty. They were beheaded in the town on the same day.
On 7 May Edward left Tewkesbury. He was barely out of the town when news came that Queen Margaret had been tracked down and taken at a nearby poor religious house, possibly Malvern Priory, in the company of her son’s widow, Anne Neville, the countess of Devon and Lady Katherine Vaux. The queen was brought, broken-spirited, to London in a cart. Her life was spared, but her fight was over. She would spend the next four years in honourable confinement, the prisoner of Alice de la Pole, the aged widow of her husband’s greatest minister, the duke of Suffolk, who had once been her lady-in-waiting. In 1475 Margaret would be ransomed back to Louis XI, under whose patronage she would live out the rest of her life: lonely, defeated and stripped of her power, her days of adventure over.
There was one last serious flurry of Lancastrian rebellion: as news reached London that all had been lost at Tewkesbury, Warwick’s cousin Thomas Neville, known universally as ‘the bastard of Fauconberg’, raised a rebellion in his father’s home county of Kent. He was an extremely accomplished sea captain, pirate and soldier, and between 10 May and 14 May he sailed up and down the Thames, launching attacks by land and sea on London’s gates and walls, aided by several hundred crack troops from Calais: it seems likely that they hoped to remove Henry VI from the Tower. But Edward had thought to anticipate an attack on the city. Anthony, Earl Rivers had been left to lead London’s defences and he did so with great distinction. Despite
the fact that Fauconberg set up cannon on the south bank of the Thames to pound the city’s walls, destroying part of London Bridge and capturing the Aldgate, Rivers and the earl of Essex husbanded the Londoners’ defences, counter-attacked effectively from within the city and eventually hounded Fauconberg and his men away: he took ship and fled back across the Channel. (He would later be captured at Southampton, handed over to the duke of Gloucester and executed, his severed head being placed on London Bridge, facing Kent, whence he had brought his rebels.) With Fauconberg’s defeat the last serious plank of Lancastrian resistance was broken. On Tuesday 21 May 1471, Edward rode once more into London in a procession led by the triumphant Gloucester, ‘with a retinue far greater than any of his former armies, and with standards unfurled and borne before him and the nobles of his army’.41 Trumpets blared as the triumphant king returned to his city ‘to the great joy and consolation of his friends, allies and well-willers … and to the great confusion of all his enemies’.
That same night, Henry VI died. The king’s confessor and biographer John Blacman said that Henry spent his last days having visions, including one in which he successfully admonished an imaginary woman whom he saw through his window attempting to drown a child.42 A more physically harmless inhabitant of the Tower of London it was hard to imagine, but Edward was no longer prepared to be merciful beyond reason. The official chronicler of the Yorkist royal victory said that Henry reacted very badly to the certainty of his defeat and the death of his son: ‘He took it to so great despite, ire and indignation, that, of pure displeasure and melancholy, he died.’43 This would have been an unsatisfactory explanation even were it not for the fact that Richard duke of Gloucester was in the Tower on the night of Henry’s death: a more believable account is given by the chronicler Warkworth, who recorded that Henry was ‘put to death’ between eleven o’clock and midnight.44 His body was wrapped in linen and taken the next day by torchlight to St Paul’s for display; it bled on the cathedral pavement several times. Later, Henry’s corpse was transported by boat to Chertsey Abbey for burial. (It would be exhumed and moved to Windsor in 1484.) Henry may have been bludgeoned to death: his corpse was found much later to have light brown hair matted with what appeared to be blood.45
