Henry, Margaret and de Brézé were back in Bamborough in June 1463 and it was from here that Margaret and de Brézé sailed for Sluys in late July, taking with them the young Edward prince of Wales, Exeter, John Fortescue, Edmund Mountfort, Robert Whitingham, Edmund Hampden, Henry Roos, Thomas Ormond, Doctors Morton and Mackerell and others, who were destined to become a permanent court in exile of some 200 persons in all.8 Throwing herself upon the reluctant hospitality of the duke of Burgundy, the queen and her entourage were conveyed by him to the duchy of Bar where her father, René of Anjou, provided her and the prince with a permanent residence at St Michael in Barrois.9 Here they existed in poverty until 1471.
The decision to remove to a remote and permanent place of safety with the Lancastrian heir must have been taken by Queen Margaret in view of the increasingly hopeless appearance of Henry’s cause. Henry himself returned to Edinburgh into the care of the chancellor, James Kennedy, bishop of St Andrews, who claimed a special responsibility for Henry’s welfare because he had once been personally instructed to look after him by King Charles VII of France. The rest of the year 1463 was a black one indeed. Edward IV succeeded in making a tripartite truce with France and Burgundy at Hesdin in the autumn, the first since 1449, one condition of which was that Louis XI should give no more help to his Lancastrian cousins. Early in December he also secured a truce for a year with Scotland, with a view to a lasting peace.10 There was now a real danger of Henry’s extradition from Scotland since, as Edward IV claimed, he had not become James Ill’s liege man or subject and was therefore Edward’s rebel and traitor.11 Death also deprived Henry of two of his principal supporters in Scotland, Mary of Guelders and the earl of Angus. The Lancastrians’ presence there was becoming precarious and Bishop Kennedy, who at Henry’s plea first took him north to St Andrews for greater safety some time after 2 January 1464,12 returned him to Bamborough before 22 February 1464. Here messages for Margaret were entrusted to Guillaume Cousinot returning to France. Cousinot also carried pleas for assistance to the Burgundian heir, the count of Charolais, to the duke of Brittany and to their Angevin relations. According to these, expressions of goodwill and urgings for Henry to assert his rights were then reaching Bamborough from all over his kingdom and a little practical help from all his well-wishers abroad at this crucial time was all that was needed for success.13 Two additional northern castles, Norham and Skipton in Craven, were indeed secured for Henry at this time,14 indicating that Bamborough had become a centre for successful Lancastrian raiding parties. But in fact his overall position had worsened with the loss of his secure retreat in Scotland.
It was Lancastrian attempts from Bamborough to interfere with the conduct of Edward IV’s peace negotiations with Scotland which now led to two engagements, at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham, which finally destroyed the remaining Lancastrian hold on the north of England. Warwick and his brothers George, the chancellor and John Nevill, warden of the East March, had been entrusted with the Scottish negotiations which were fixed to be held at York. John Nevill, travelling up to meet and conduct the Scottish envoys south to York, was intercepted on 25 April 1464 by Lancastrian forces under Somerset, Hunger-ford, Roos and Sir Ralph Percy, on Hedgeley Moor, some nine miles north-west of Alnwick. In the encounter Sir Ralph Percy was slain. Nevill was able to complete his mission, but the Lancastrian field force did not disperse and moved south into the Tyne valley. On 14 May Nevill, with Lords Greystock and Willoughby, moved north again from Newcastle to engage them afresh. On the 15th he attacked and trapped them in their encampment, in a meadow called the Linnels on the Devil’s Water, south of the river Tyne, some two or three miles from Hexham. His victory was complete. Its melancholy significance was that all Henry’s leading supporters still in England were either slain, captured in the field, or taken and executed soon afterwards. The fall of the Lancastrian-held castles swiftly followed.15 Somerset and four others were executed immediately, Roos, Hungerford, Sir Thomas Findern and three more at Newcastle on 17 May, Sir Philip Went-worth, Sir William Pennington and five others at Middleham on the 18th, and fourteen more at York at the end of the month. A few weeks later Sir William Tailboys was captured hiding in a coalpit and beheaded at Newcastle. Alnwick and Dunstanborough capitulated on 23 and 24 June; Bamborough was battered into submission and its commander, Sir Ralph Grey, executed at Doncaster on 10 July. John Nevill was fittingly created earl of Northumberland by the grateful Edward IV. The Nevills had in fact wiped out all effective Lancastrian resistance in the north of England.
Indeed only Henry himself survived. Left in Bywell castle on the north bank of the Tyne at a safe distance from the field while the issue was decided, the last signs of him for over a year were his bycoket or crowned cap and other personal possessions found there by John Nevill when he took the castle. He presented these to Edward IV at Pontefract.16 So complete was Henry’s disappearance that Edward IV is alleged to have suspected he was once more being harboured in Scotland.17 Gregory’s chronicle, which quite wrongly describes his final capture as taking place on Furness Fells, the source of the belief that he had been sheltered in Furness abbey, also states that he had come from Scotland.18 In fact he seems to have stayed in Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Westmorland all the time until his capture. He was several times housed by John Maychell of Crackenthorpe near Appleby, who was afterwards pardoned for it.19 He was finally discovered one day in July 1465 among the gentry of Ribblesdale, at his dinner in Waddington Hall near Clitheroe, a seat of the Tempests of Bracewell, where Sir Richard Tempest had made him welcome. After a brief flight, his whereabouts were again betrayed, allegedly by William Cantelowe, a monk of Abingdon, but those rewarded for his capture were Sir Richard himself, his brother John Tempest, his relatives Thomas, John, Richard and Edmund Talbot, of nearby Bashall and Salesbury, and their associates together with the Yorkist knight Sir James Harington. His reward was Sir Richard Tunstall’s various estates at Thurland, Lonsdale and Kendal in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Westmorland, granted by his grateful king on 29 July.20 Tunstall, formerly Henry’s carver, had probably been his main protector over the previous year and even warded off his would-be captors at Waddington Hall for a brief time. But Henry was soon afterwards taken in a wood called Clitherwood, near Brungerley stepping stones over the Ribble, accompanied only by two chaplains, Doctor Thomas Manning, former dean of Windsor, and Doctor Bedon, and a young squire named Ellerton. Brought to London on horseback, with his feet bound to his stirrups, he was met by the earl of Warwick at Islington on 24 June and paraded through the streets to the Tower.21 Edward IV and his new queen had received the joyful news of his capture, brought in haste to them in Canterbury cathedral, on 18 July. They celebrated it with a Te Deum, a sermon and a procession to Becket’s tomb.22
Henry was next confined in the Tower for over five years. Other notable fifteenth-century captives of English kings wrote poetry, political testaments, corresponded, plotted; with Henry there is no contemporary record of activity of any kind whatsoever. This was not due to the rigidity of his confinement for, we are told, any man might come and speak with him by licence of his keepers.23 Equally there is no evidence of the hunger, thirst, mockings, derision, abuse and many other hardships which the hagiographic Blacman tract later alleged he now had to endure, in imitation of Christ.24 Five members of Edward IV’s own household, seconded with others to wait and attend on ‘Henry of Windsor’, are named in the issue rolls: William Griffiths, Edmund Clare, Nicholas Hatfield, Thomas Grey and Hugh Courtenay and, later, Robert Radclyff esquire and William Sayer. The highest number of his attendants at any time, some of whom were presumably guards, was twenty-two;25 five marks a week were assigned for his maintenance and paid regularly to his attendants throughout his captivity. For example, Thomas Grey received £106 13s 4d advance payment for his diet and expenses, on 13 May 1469.26 A priest, William Kymberley, who celebrated mass for him daily by personal command of Edward IV, received 7½d a day special reward, although he had to wait fifteen months for his fir
st payment.27 On occasion wine was sent to him from the royal cellars and velvet cloth supplied from the wardrobe for his gowns and doublets.28 When he was led from captivity, by his old friend the bishop of Winchester, on 3 October 1470, he was alleged to have been not so worshipfully arrayed, nor so cleanly kept, as befitted such a prince,29 but this may not have been his captors’ fault. On the whole such scanty evidence as survives suggests a humane and lenient captivity which Henry accepted with complete resignation. He could be a danger to Edward IV only as a puppet in the hands of his enemies and the careful preservation of his life in captivity was Edward’s best safeguard against a resurgence of the Lancastrian cause.
Henry’s brief restoration, from the end of September 1470 until 11 April 1471, or ‘readeption’ as it was then styled, was thus understandably ascribed by many of his astonished former subjects to a miracle, to the direct intervention of the hand of God. The shrewd Crowland chronicler heard many say as much, but, he added, so inscrutable are the ways of God that within six months, not one of those who professed to believe in the divine intervention dared acknowledge that he had wished Henry well.30 Ten years had largely obliterated the memory of his ineffective rule, although a tradition of the chief evil consequences of it which had made most of his subjects welcome a change in 1461 survived: ‘the murder of the good duke of Gloucester, the poisoning of John Holand duke of Exeter, the fostering of Suffolk and his mischievous and covetous clique, the loss of France, Normandy, Gascony and Guienne’.31 The king himself was now remembered as an ‘innocent man’, which meant, in the words of the Tudor chronicler Hall, glossing the event, a nonentity, ‘a man of no great wit… neither a fool nor very wise’,32 but Edward’s own rule since had been only fair promises of better times, unfulfilled: battle after battle, disturbances and insecurity, taxes, decline of trade and constant demands for military service. Things were at least as bad as they had been before, so why not have another king? In fact Henry’s restoration owed nothing to the hand of God, or to the fickle wishes of Edward IV’s subjects at large. The deus ex machina had been the French king Louis XI.
From 1464 Edward IV had resumed the normal, popular policy of all successful late-medieval English kings, the assertion of his ‘rights’ against the Valois and the recovery of the French inheritance. As the son and heir of Richard duke of York, who had constantly attacked Henry VI’s ministers for their loss of the overseas possessions, this was especially to be expected. He made a personal declaration in 1467 to parliament that he would lead his armies across the Channel if they would give him the means to do so. The Commons responded with two tenths and fifteenths. Thus they revealed once again the basic popularity of this traditional policy. Alliances with Scotland, Denmark, Castile and Brittany were announced, and compacts with the duke of Burgundy were to be sealed by his marriage to Edward’s sister Margaret. Edward was ready to challenge the ‘ancient adversary of France’.33 In fact, Louis XI broke up the intended coalition against him. He invaded Brittany and compelled its duke to desert his allies. He secured a treaty and truce with Burgundy. He dabbled in Lancastrian plots, raising counter fears of invasion in England and sending Jasper Tudor’s expeditionary force to Wales.34
It was a breach between Edward and his most powerful supporter, Warwick, which finally presented Louis with a real bonus, the means of removing this hostile English king from his usurped throne. How and when that breach first arose and developed into armed rebellion has been the subject of much debate by historians.35 The best contemporary observers believed it grew out of conflict for the control of high policy between them. Warwick, who was thought of abroad as the real ruler of England under the king, favoured, and persisted in fostering, a revival of Henry VI’s discredited peace-marriage policy towards France; peace and cooperation through a French marriage for Edward’s sister, not a Burgundian one.36 Warwick’s consequent rebellion in concert with Edward’s brother George duke of Clarence may well have been intended to declare Edward a bastard and replace him by Clarence.37 It had nothing to do with Henry VI, Queen Margaret, or the Lancastrian cause. It was launched from Warwick’s old base at Calais, whither the Nevills and Clarence had repaired to celebrate Clarence’s marriage to Warwick’s daughter Isabel, a marriage which had been expressly forbidden by Edward. In striking imitation of that enterprise of 1460, which had triumphed with the capture of Henry VI at Northampton, they landed in Kent in July 1469, preceded by a manifesto of ‘reform’ which, mutatis mutandis, was identical with the placards of that earlier occasion. The Wydevilles, Sir William Herbert and Humphrey Stafford, the new Yorkist earls of Pembroke and Devon, Lord Audley and Sir John Fogge now replaced the earls of Shrewsbury and Wiltshire and Lord Beaumont of 1460 as the evil advisers who had estranged the lords of the blood from the king’s council, appropriated his landed estate and revenues, caused his subjects to be loaded down with taxes and purveyances, perverted the processes of justice to serve their own ends, plundered the church, etc. The only basic difference was that it was now Edward IV and not Henry VI who was threatened with the fate of Edward II and Richard II.38 At no stage yet were Warwick and Clarence converted Lancastrians. A possible restoration of Henry VI, as yet, never entered their minds.
In the event, although they were able to secure possession of Edward’s person and destroy the so-called royal favourites, they were unable to establish any acceptable authority of their own. The lack of any effective government provided the opportunity for a Lancastrian rising in the northern borders, led by two members of the senior branch of the Nevills, Sir Humphrey Nevill of Brauncepeth and his brother Charles. Warwick found that his proclamation to raise the forces needed to suppress this rising was useless without the king’s authority behind it. Men knew that, unlike Henry, Edward IV could only be forcibly restrained and could not be used as a puppet king, therefore he had to be released and seen to be evidently free before the necessary troops-were forthcoming to suppress the Lancastrian rising. With peace restored, and his freedom regained, Edward now seized his opportunity to re-establish himself. He followed a policy of pacification, rather than punishment, for the uprisings, until new disturbances began in Lincolnshire early in 1470. Warwick and Clarence also became involved in this rising and after its suppression fled to the continent where the duke of Burgundy, and even Warwick’s hitherto firm Calais base, refused to receive them.39 Edward’s ‘great rebels’ were thus driven into the arms of Louis XI who was able to insist on the impossible, their reconciliation with Queen Margaret of Anjou and with Edward prince of Wales. The restoration of the House of Lancaster was the unavoidable price they had to pay for the French king’s invaluable assistance. With what reservations and reluctance Warwick and the queen sealed the compact has been variously estimated. It was inevitable that their agreement should frustrate the ambition of the treacherous Clarence. He could gain little from the success of a plan to restore the House of Lancaster, which was to be cemented by the marriage of the Lancastrian heir to Warwick’s daughter Anne. He had to be satisfied with being designated residual heir, should the Lancastrian line utterly fail.
When Warwick landed in Devon on 13 September 1470 the king was still in Yorkshire, after quieting a minor rising in the north, possibly contrived by the Nevills to distract him. He began his march to London, but waited at Doncaster for the considerable force being assembled at Pontefract in his name by John Nevill, marquis of Montagu, Warwick’s brother. The king still trusted Montagu’s loyalty, even against his brother’s enterprise, but Edward underestimated Montagu’s resentment over his loss of the substantial earldom of Northumberland. The king had wished to conciliate the Percies and so had required him, earlier that year, to relinquish the earldom and the wardenship of the East March to the Percy earl of Northumberland, and accept in its place the superior, but empty title of marquis. When Edward heard that Montagu had turned traitor and was bent on his capture, he fled across the Wash to Lynn and thence to Burgundy.
It was the report of Edward’s precipitate flight whic
h prompted the civic authorities in London to take possession of the Tower and caused Henry to be visited there on 3 October by Bishop Wainfleet and the mayor. They removed him from his captivity to the king’s lodgings, which had been prepared for Queen Elizabeth’s approaching confinement. She fled to sanctuary at Westminster. Loyalty could hardly be maintained to a king who had fled the country. Warwick and Clarence were duly proclaiming Henry’s title on their advance towards London and already, on Sunday 30 September, a Dr William Goddard had been put up to preach to that effect at St Paul’s Cross.40 George Nevill, archbishop of York, entered the city with a considerable force on 5 October. Clarence and Warwick arrived with their army next day and removed Henry in state to the bishop of London’s palace. On 8 October Warwick felt able to inform Louis XI that all was well. Henry was re-established in his kingdom.41 On 13 October, the Translation of St Edward, they took him in procession for a crown-wearing to St Paul’s, Warwick bearing his train and the earl of Oxford his sword. He was then returned to the bishop’s palace and installed there with a new household. Sir Henry Lewes was appointed ruler and governor of it and over the next six weeks spent £1,001 22½d, largely out of his own pocket, establishing and maintaining it. Here Henry seems to have remained for five months of his nominal restoration, until Edward IV entered the palace on Maundy Thursday 11 April 1471 and returned him, together with the archbishop of York who then had custody of him, to the Tower.42
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