by Ed West
By 1450 England’s 2,000 aristocrats were going down in the world; since the Black Death landowning had lost its profitability, and they had to sell to yeoman farmers to make ends meet. A new class of wealthier ex-peasant was rising, men who had became increasingly wealthy and able to educate their children. Many of these ‘broggers’ (brokers) made money in the wool trade, building the cottages and picturesque churches of the Cotswolds.
Within the aristocracy, vicious clan rivalries prevailed. The most bitter was the Neville-Percy feud in the far north, hugely violent despite there being marriages between the two families; likewise the Nevilles were related to the Somersets, but still fought each other. Unlike most of the aristocratic families, the Nevilles traced their line back to the Anglo-Saxons and the old royal house of Northumbria through an 11th-century magnate called Uhtred (their Norman-sounding name was only adopted several years after the Conquest).
The most powerful aristocrats commanded vast armies and led them into battle under their banners – the White Lion of Mortimer, the Bear of the Duke of Warwick, or the White Swan of the Duke of Buckingham. Where their men would go drinking the landlords began to parade the sigil of the lord by the entrance, which is how English ale houses and taverns (and many of today’s pubs) got their names. Although it later became known as the Quarrel of the Warring Roses and later War of the Two Roses, the House of York’s symbol of the white rose and Lancaster’s of red were rarely used, and when the conflict climaxed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, the rival armies displayed banners of a boar and a dragon, the latter of which belonged to the Welsh Henry Tudor and became the symbol of that country. (In fact it might have been a good idea to wear roses: at the Battle of Barnet the Lancastrian faction ended up fighting each other by accident.)
The kingdom may have had a weakling on the throne, terrified of sex and women, offended by nudity, and dressed in a hair shirt, but the queen was anything but. Formidable, beautiful, cunning and ruthless, Margaret of Anjou was every bit the Cersei Lannister figure, respected even by the Scots warlords with whom she took shelter, and feared by Edward of York more ‘than all the princes of the House of Lancaster combined’, according to one chronicler.
Raised in Lorraine, in the east of France, she had been brought over to England at the age of 15, a marriage arranged by William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk. He had welcomed her when she arrived in Hampshire in a storm, and remained her ally, some claim her lover. Like Cersei, she was rumoured to have infidelities, and battled with powerful nobles who wished the crown for themselves, fighting fiercely for her son’s right to the throne after her docile husband had surrendered.
When she finally fell pregnant seven years after their marriage, Henry went into a catatonic depression; when he came out of it a couple of years later he swore he could not remember having the child, who he claimed must have been brought by the Holy Ghost. This made him a laughing stock all over Europe. Queen Margaret became regent in all but name, and was roundly hated; arrogant and haughty, she kept a great household, with five female attendants and ten ‘little damsels’.
The king’s misrule led ambitious men with royal blood to circle around. Greatest of all was Richard, Duke of York, second cousin of Henry V and great-grandson of Edward III. Margaret despised York and the feeling was mutual. Allied to York was his brother-in-law Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and Salisbury’s son the Earl of Warwick. Warwick and Somerset, the leader of the Queen’s faction, had an ancient grudge that dated back to when they were married to half-sisters and argued over the inheritance.
Warwick the Kingmaker, as the younger Richard Neville was later called, was the grandson of Ralph de Neville, an especially brutal figure who rather resembles Game of Thrones character Walder Frey.xxii Just as the Freys were enraged at the wealth and power of their rival northern warlords, the Starks, so were the Nevilles towards the Percys. Like Frey, Ralph Neville had an enormous number of children, at least 22 by two wives. His first wife, Margaret Stafford, the daughter of the Duke of Stafford and descended from the Mortimers, gave him eight children, but died in 1396, and just five months later he married again. Wife number two was the even grander Joan Beaufort, the daughter of John of Gaunt by his mistress Katherine Swynford, who had in childhood been legitimized and therefore become a powerful landowner. Neville’s second marriage produced another 14 children, including nine sons; however the two branches became bitterly opposed after he was persuaded by Joan to pass over his sons from the first marriage in his inheritance, and they ended up on different sides at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460.
The Neville family tree illustrates the complex web of alliances of the period. Ralph’s eldest son by his second marriage, Richard, born 1400, married the Montacute heiress of Salisbury and became Earl. His younger brothers William, George and Edward, became respectively barons of Fauconberg, Latimer and Bergavenny, all by marriage. Some of Ralph de Neville’s daughters married well, too, to the Dukes of York and Norfolk and earls of Stafford and Northumberland. But Richard Neville’s match was by far the greatest; and he also inherited the bulk of the estates, the castles of Middleham, Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire, and the main Neville home of Raby Castle in Durham, as well as estates in Westmoreland and Essex. Salisbury's eldest son, born in 1428, then became Earl of Warwick through marriage to Anne de Beauchamp, which made him the largest landowner in the country.
Another of Ralph’s children, Cecily, was betrothed to Richard of York at the age of eight and married at 13. Cecily Neville was pious, rising at seven and attending eight church services a day, before going to bed at eight. She bore her husband 13 children, and after his death she would stand by her eldest son as he fought for the crown. Although York, whose parents both died in his youth, could be cold and charmless, they appeared to have a happy marriage.
In 1450 the country suffered a wave of violence. In January soldiers in Portsmouth rioted and murdered the local bishop, who in his dying words blamed the loss of Maine on the Duke of Suffolk, who had become the principle power behind the throne since the downfall of the king’s uncle, Gloucester, three years earlier. According to the Abbot of St Albans, ‘satellites of Satan’ had poisoned the king’s mind against Gloucester, who was placed under house arrest but then died mysteriously in February 1447.
Later that month Suffolk was arrested and placed in the Tower of London, but the king intervened and ordered that he instead be banished. However, on his journey to exile in Burgundy sailors from a royal ship caught him and he was taken to a small boat and a sword was prepared to kill him, befitting his aristocratic status. His executioner, ‘one of the lewdest of the ship’ and armed with a rusty weapon, took several blows to finish the job.
In June there was an uprising in Kent, led by Jack Cade, who claimed to be a cousin of the Duke of York, although he was actually a former soldier and convicted thief from Ireland. The county had been devastated by the collapse of the wine trade due to the loss of France, and the halving of imports. The complaints of the Kent rebellion were that ‘France is lost, the king himself is so placed that he may not pay for his meat and drink, and he owes more than ever any King of England ought, for daily his traitors about him, when anything should come to him by his laws, at once they ask it for him.’
The rebellion descended into carnage. Numerous officials were executed, and the heads of the hated Warden of the Cinque Ports, James Fiennes, and his son-in-law William Crowmer were made to kiss. When he arrived in the capital, Cade rode around London with Fiennes’ body attached to his horse, and the Sheriff of Kent was dragged to Mile End and beheaded. Understandably this rather alarmed the Londoners, who ended up fighting the Kentishmen on London Bridge. After it was crushed, the Cade rebellion was punished by the ‘Harvest of heads’, with mass executions across the county. Then in September 1450 York marched on Westminster with 5,000 men in a show of force, and while the Lords and Commons sat, his men placed York's symbol of the falcon and fetterlock around town. Then in November there was a brawl in
Parliament between supporters and opponents of York.
The war in France lurched from disaster to disaster, with the defeat at Castillon, in Gascony, in 1453, marking the end of the 100 Years War. The king now descended into full madness, and in March 1454 York was appointed Protector of England, insisting on a strange clause that stated he didn’t want the job.
York could not work with his enemy John Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, a grandson of John of Gaunt, and soon violence broke out, sparked by the Percy-Neville feud. It erupted in August 1454 at the wedding of Sir Thomas Neville, grandson of Ralph and a cousin of Warwick, and Maud Stanhope, whose father had lands that had been confiscated from the Percys by Henry IV. The Battle of Heworth Moor, as this red wedding was called, was ‘the beginning of sorrows’. (Real life incidents where hospitality was violated were rare, and as in Westeros, the laws of hospitality were especially important in all ancient and medieval societies. The most notorious violation in British history was the massacre of Glencoe in 1692, in which the Campbell clan killed 38 MacDonalds who were their houseguests. Other possible inspirations for the Red Wedding are the murder of William and David Douglas by the Livingstons and Critchtons at Edinburgh Castle in November 1440.xxiii And back in the 11th century nobleman Eadric Streona had become notorious for having killed a rival while entertaining him, and then blinding both his sons. Having double-crossed Ethelred to side with the Viking king Sweyn, Sweyn’s son Canute had him executed.)
The first battle proper took place at St Albans in May 1455, with 6,000 men fighting with longbows, swords, maces, axes and pole-axes through side streets and even houses. Most of the battle involved bludgeoning, or the use of battleaxes; once a man was down his enemies would put a dagger through the slits of his eyes. ‘Here you saw a man with his brains dashed out. Here another with his throat cut, the whole street full of corpses,’ local Abbot of St Albans, John Whethamstede, wrote.
The Nevilles killed the Earl of Northumberland, the head of the Percy family and son of Hotspur; his son Henry, the third earl, would be killed at Towton six years later. Somerset, fighting hand-to-hand with Warwick outside an inn called The Castle, looked up and felt a sense of doom, recalling that a soothsayer had once warned him about castles; momentarily stunned, he was fatally stabbed.
King Henry spent the duration standing under the royal banner in the market place, a pathetic figure. At some point the Lancastrian nerve was lost, and the king’s men began to flee, leaving him sitting on the ground, dazed and wounded in the neck. The Duke of York and Earl of Warwick fell on their knees before the king, calling for a surgeon to help him. He was respectfully brought down to the local abbey, where survivors on both sides spent the night together, saying a Mass for the 60 dead.
The king awoke from his stupor in early 1458, and declared that York should pay for his behaviour with a fine of £45 a year for Masses to be said for the dead. This would be followed by a ‘love day’ on March 25, Lady Day (Mothering Sunday), a well-meaning but useless idea fashioned by the more moderate men of the council. It was hoped to bring together Lancastrians Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford, whose fathers had all been killed at St Albans, and Yorkists Salisbury and Warwick, who would make reparations to them and agree to keep the peace for 10 years. The leaders of all the factions walked hand-in-hand to St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving, the feeling of love only slightly diminished by the fact that the Lancastrians had turned up with 2,000 heavily-armed men, the Yorks and Nevilles with 1,500, and the two sides were separated by the walls of the city… while the Mayor of London brought a force of 500 just in case anyone was not feeling the love.
In November that year Warwick narrowly avoided assassination and escaped to Calais, the king and queen fled to the Midlands, and York turned up in Westminster expecting to be proclaimed King – yet when he went to sit on the throne there were hushes rather than acclamations. Queen Margaret tried to punish York through an Act of Attainder, which blamed him for all the kingdom’s troubles. This took away his lands but it also denied his heirs any of them, an act against precedent (the sons of traitors were given their father’s lands after his death).
At a battle at Ludford Bridge, Shropshire, in 1459 York was defeated, and made for Calais, which Warwick had captured; it was England’s second most important city and the entry point for the country’s continental exports. More battles took place, at Blore Heath in 1459 and Northampton in 1460, where poor King Henry was discovered sitting in his tent, Queen Margaret having fled to Wales with their son Edward. London fell to the Yorkists, with the loyalist Lord Scales, a veteran of the 100 Years War, holding onto the Tower of London by firing on the city, before trying to escape to Westminster Abbey. The notoriously unruly London boatmen surrounded and murdered him, dragging his naked corpse onto the priory of St Mary Overie in Southwark.
Now York claimed the throne outright, using his descent from Lionel, second son of Edward III. His own followers thought this was a step too far, among them Warwick, Salisbury and York’s eldest son Edward, Earl of March, just 17 but already a warrior in his own right.
A compromise was reached where York would be made heir, and Prince Edward disinherited. Henry, totally insane by now anyway, agreed, but the queen refused and the war went on. Warwick remained in London, with the king in the tower, while Edward of March went to Salisbury to recruit more men and York and his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, rode to Yorkshire. There they spent Christmas in the castle of Sandal, but were besieged and tricked into coming out to face a Lancastrian army of 5,000 men. While York was killed, his son made his escape, but on the way out was stopped by Baron Clifford, a leading Lancastrian whose father had died at St Albans, and a descendent of Ralph de Neville through his first wife. Upon discovering his captive’s identity, Clifford shouted: ‘By God’s blood, thy father slew mine and so shall I slay thee.’ Salisbury’s son Thomas Neville was also killed and Salisbury himself captured and beheaded the next day. The heads of York and Rutland were cut off and with Salisbury’s were stuck on the gates of the city, York’s with a paper crown, along with the sign ‘Let York overlook the town of York’.
While York’s youngest sons, George and Richard, were sent to France to safety, Edward of March was in the West Country celebrating Christmas when he was told the devastating news. Tall, blond, good-looking and affable, he had charm as well as strength; when a Lancastrian force landed accidentally at Calais, Edward sweet-talked its leader Lord Audley into changing sides, despite his father having been killed by Yorkists. But he also had intelligence. While a more impulsive man would have headed to Wakefield to avenge his father, Edward stayed put and planned his attack. Instead he met a Lancastrian force at Mortimer’s Cross on February 3, 1461, where ‘on the morning there was seen three suns rising’. It was a parhelion, or sun dog, an optical illusion caused by the sun refracting on ice crystals, but the Yorkists took it as a good omen, representing the three surviving sons of York and the Trinity. March took the symbol of the ‘Sun in Splendour’ as his personal banner, which became a popular name for taverns during his reign.
Edward triumphed, and after the battle the Yorkists ran after the fleeing enemies, capturing Henry VI’s stepfather, an elderly knight called Owain Tudor and taking him to Hereford for execution on Edward’s orders. The old man was unaware at first what was happening, until his captors undid the buttons around his neck, when he realised the full horror of his fate, and lamented that the head that was to go on a block once lay on a queen’s lap. His head was mounted on the market cross, where an old mad woman combed the corpse’s hair and washed off the blood by 100 candles she had placed by it.
Although we think of the 15th century as the golden age of chivalry, like many concepts it only became celebrated as it was dying. A great turning point had been Agincourt, after which French prisoners were murdered, and back in England the cycle of revenge had grown steadily worse, and the rules of war had disappeared, with routine executions and the cry of ‘kill the nobles, spare the c
ommons’. Le Morte d’Arthur, recalling a bygone age of chivalry, was published in 1485, as the concept it celebrated came to an end.
Meanwhile Margaret had gone to Scotland, where she met Mary, the Queen of the Scots, on January 5, 1461. There she agreed to hand over Berwick in exchange for an army, not realizing what a terrible prospect this was to the people of the Realm, who instinctively feared the men north of the border. Furthermore, short of funds to attract soldiers, she had agreed that anyone who signed up could freely plunder once they had crossed the Trent.
The two sides met again on February 17, 1461, at the second Battle of St Albans. Margaret and her Scottish army had brought 10,000 men; Warwick had 8,000, as well as the king as his prisoner. And although Warwick’s Burgundian soldiers were armed with hackbuts, which fired lead shots (the first use of hand guns in England), the Lancastrians were the victors. Afterwards the king’s captors Lord Bonville and Sir Thomas Kyriell were brought before the queen and seven-year-old Prince Edward. He was asked: ‘Fair son, by what manner of means shall these knights die?’
‘Let their heads be taken off.’ The boy got his wish.
Bonville and Kyriell had been ordered to guard the fallen king, but had not behaved dishonourably and treated him well. Bonville replied to the boy: ‘May God destroy those who taught thee this manner of speech.’
Thirty-one men were knighted after the battle, including the young prince and Andrew Trollope, who had changed sides, and boasted to the Queen: ‘My Lord, I have not deserved it, for I slew but 15 men, for I stood still in one place, and they came unto me.’
