Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  After Warwick sailed back to Calais, driving a fleet hastily assembled by the Duke of Exeter back to port, the papacy provided the cherry on the top of his brimming sundae of fortuna. As in everything to do with the medieval Church, the backstory is wonderfully intricate; but as it affects our narrative the key component is that Pius II had become obsessed with launching a crusade against the Ottoman Empire. In 1459 he appointed Francesco Coppini, made Bishop of Terni in 1458 at the instigation of Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan, as his legate to England, charged with obtaining King Henry’s support for the crusade.

  Pius was deeply misogynist, probably from self-disgust over his sexual incontinence as a young man. In the course of political missions to Scotland, England and Strasbourg in the 1430s, he had sired two bastard children. During 1459–61 the pope’s opinion of events in England, as recorded in his Commentaries, seems to have been based on Coppini’s reports. These, in turn, reflected Coppini’s ambition to win an English bishopric and/or a cardinalate, in which he was encouraged by Warwick after they met in Calais in May 1460.

  Pius would not have promoted Coppini to legate a latere (plenipotentiary) in England and its dominions without the consent of Archbishop Bourchier, who had his own axe to grind with the Lancastrian regime. In February 1460 the pope granted Coppini the right to ‘compel the disobedient by ecclesiastical censure and deprivation and to appoint preachers’ to proselytize the crusade, and to offer indulgences for all their sins to those who made even modest financial contributions.

  Yet, a month later, Coppini wrote to Sforza from Bruges, alleging he had left England on the advice of Warwick – who was at the time embarked on his expedition to Ireland. So, Coppini lied to his patron but not to his employer, as the pope continued to show confidence in his ability to raise funds in England for the crusade, something he would not have done if Coppini’s departure had been unauthorized.

  What was it Coppini could not tell Sforza, but had no need to explain to Pius II? The most likely answer is that he was acting on the advice of Archbishop Bourchier, who had convinced the pope that Marguerite was the greatest obstacle to England contributing to the crusade.

  Forensic analysis of correspondence between Canterbury and Rome may reveal secret writing (commonly used by Renaissance princes when plotting nefarious deeds) in which the archbishop committed secular treason, and which influenced the pope to support the Yorkist cause. Using the vainglorious Coppini as their cat’s-paw gave pope and archbishop deniability, while the ambitious legate, frantic for advancement, had every reason to conceal the source of his instructions. It was no less significant that wealthy Bishop William Grey of Ely, a papal appointee and previously neutral, came out for the Yorkists at this time.

  Archbishop Bourchier’s full siblings were committed Yorkists, and he was also acutely aware that the sympathy of his dangerously volatile Kentish flock was overwhelmingly favourable to Warwick. Thus it came about that when Warwick invaded England in June 1460, Bourchier had summoned a convocation in London to vote the ecclesiastical tenth requested by the pope for his crusade. Presumably it went to Warwick instead, as Pius never saw a penny of it.

  Whether or not the hypothetical backstory can be established, when Coppini and Warwick met in May the legate became an active partisan of the Yorkist cause, without rebuke from the pope at the time, or subsequently in the Commentaries. On 24 June Fauconberg and Dynham launched another pre-emptive raid on Sandwich, where Osbert Mountfort, previously in command of Rysbank and dismissed by Warwick in 1456, was gathering reinforcements for Somerset. This time there was no surprise and Dynham was seriously wounded in the fighting, but Fauconberg prevailed. Mountfort was sent back to Calais and beheaded.

  Two days later Warwick, Salisbury and March arrived at Sandwich and set out on a triumphal progression to London. Kentish men flocked to their banners, and two lords sent to oppose them defected. They were the perennial Yorkist Cobham, who had gained some measure of Lancastrian trust by not joining the Ludlow rebellion, and Bergavenny, the uncle whom Warwick had dispossessed. An explanation why Buckingham had been replaced by Rivers as Warden of the Cinque Ports emerges from the modifications made to the Yorkist manifesto as they marched towards London: the Kentish men demanded Buckingham be added to the short list of evil councillors to be done away with, for being ‘fat of grease’ from profiteering.

  If it were not that Warwick had given himself so little time to prepare it since returning from Ireland, one would be tempted to believe the unbridled popular joy at his return reported by Wavrin had been carefully orchestrated. The Yorkist lords swept into London, where a popular uprising forced Lord Scales and several other Lancastrian lords to retreat to the Tower. The Yorkists were welcomed by the mayor and aldermen, the Bishop of Ely and Warwick’s brother, the Bishop of Exeter. They then went to St Paul’s, where the Canterbury Convocation was in session, and renewed their oath of allegiance to the king, swearing they had come to rescue him from his wicked entourage.

  As though the loss of Kent and London was not enough, Coppini now made public the text of a long letter from him to the king, copies of which had been sent to the pope and to Marguerite. It portrayed the Yorkist lords and their motives in the best possible light, and called on Henry to accept Coppini’s mediation, or else bear full responsibility for the consequences: ‘You can prevent this if you will, and if you do not you will be guilty in the sight of God in that awful day of judgement in which I shall also stand and require of your hand the English blood, if it be spilt.’ In his covering letter to Pius II, Coppini waxed eloquent about his own skills as a conciliator:

  Since fate and necessity had caused me to be as it were an angel of peace and a mediator, [the people] looked upon me also with incredible applause, with reverence and tears, welcomed me, honoured me, praising the Lord and giving thanks with clasped hands to Your Holiness because you had sent back and restored to them your legate, whose departure with his work undone they had lately mourned.

  Self-seeking charlatan he may have been, but Coppini’s authority as papal legate a latere was unquestionable. The effect of his letter on the deeply pious Henry – if he were permitted to read and respond to it – would almost certainly have been capitulation. It follows that either it was kept from him, or else he was no longer a free agent. Either way, it helps to explain what happened in one of the most enigmatic battles of the Wars of the Roses.

  *1 Anyone who thinks there is anything modern about artfully spinning naked self-interest as a boon to humankind would be well advised to study this document.

  XXI

  * * *

  Betrayal

  Following their tumultuous welcome in Kent and unopposed admission to London, Warwick, Salisbury, Fauconberg and Edward of March were joined by John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk and Henry, Viscount Bourchier. The bigger turn-out, however, was by the lords spiritual conveniently convoked by Henry’s brother Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury. Along with Coppini, they were to play a uniquely public role in the following campaign.

  Within a few days, on 4 July, Fauconberg set out for the Midlands along Watling Street with a Van of mounted archers and hobilars. Word had come that the king’s army was trundling south from the queen’s triangle of Kenilworth, Tutbury and Leicester with about 80 guns previously taken from the Tower and used to equip her castles. Fauconberg’s task was to cause the royal army to halt well short of London, to give time for Warwick to recruit more troops and to gather guns. We know Warwick set out from London with perhaps thirty guns, and with the Tower armoury still in enemy hands he probably got them from his fleet.

  Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, commanded the royal army, which, by the time it halted just south of Northampton, included John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, John, Viscount Beaumont, Thomas Percy, Baron Egremont, and Edmund, Baron Grey of Ruthyn. It was probably not Fauconberg who caused them to halt where they did. Northampton was 67 miles from London and roughly equidistant from Kenilworth and Leicester. It was close to some of
Buckingham’s larger manors, notably Oakham, and to Beaumont’s estates in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. Fatefully, however, it was also very close to the Bedfordshire lands of the recently pardoned Grey of Ruthyn, which explains his presence in an army otherwise composed of unswervingly loyal Lancastrians.

  We have no idea how many men each side brought to the field. Since Buckingham adopted a static defensive position he must have been outnumbered, and an educated guess is that he had 10,000 or less against the rebels’ 15,000 or more. Much of the Shrewsbury affinity would have been on guard to prevent York landing in north Wales while Jasper Tudor guarded the south, and Egremont had no significant following. He was there in representation of the Percys while the northern lords rallied to his brother Northumberland at York. Possibly the idea was to hold off the rebels until the northerners could join the royal army.

  Warwick, Fauconberg, March and Viscount Bourchier left Salisbury and the other Yorkist lords to besiege the Lancastrian lords in the Tower and to secure London. The rebel army was not only more numerous but also had a high proportion of volunteers, including many veterans of the fall of Normandy. They caught up with Fauconberg at Dunstable and then marched together on Northampton, accompanied by Archbishop Bourchier, Papal Legate Coppini and several bishops. The rebel army camped for the night of 9/10 July at a ‘mountain’, possibly Hunsbury Hill, 2 miles south-east of Northampton.

  In terms of eyewitness or at least close contemporary testimony, on a scale of one to ten among the battles of the Wars of the Roses, Northampton is the ten.*1 Since the combat was almost perfunctory, the principal interest lies in locating exactly where it took place. I beg the reader’s indulgence while I illustrate the difficulty medieval historians encounter even when dealing with apparently well-documented events.

  According to An English Chronicle of the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, written by a Yorkist Londoner: ‘The king at Northampton lay at Friars, and had ordained there a strong and mighty field, in the meadows beside the Nunnery, armed and arrayed with guns, having the river at his back.’ Warwick’s Burgundian hagiographer Jehan de Wavrin locates it ‘in a park outside the town beside a little stream’. Dating from 1471, An English Chronicle states it took place ‘beside Northampton in the Newfield between Hardingstone and Sandyford’.

  Written between 1462 and 1471, Benet’s Chronicle says Henry had 20,000 men in a fortified camp between Hardingstone and Delapre Abbey, but Benet’s figures are always exaggerated. Finally, and possibly reflecting comments by Archbishop Bourchier, who viewed the battle from the top of the hill crowned by the Eleanor Cross (erected by Edward I in 1292 and still there, albeit headless, today), the Canterbury monk John Stone wrote: ‘And for the field’s name on the one part on the north-east side is called Cowemedewe. And that other part is called Menthynfeld. And for the other part is called Sandyngford bridge next to the towne. On the east side there is a water mill called Sandford mill.’

  This is not helpful. As Map 17 shows, Cow Meadow was north of the River Nene outside the town walls, bounded by the Sandyford Road, which entered Northampton through the south-western Derngate. Possibly Stone confused it with Cow Pasture, the name given to the flood plain south of the river in a 1740 map. This map also identifies a ‘Moorfield’, which might have been ‘Menthynfeld’ 280 years earlier. The only water mills were on an island in the river, with bridges to both banks. The fundamental problem with Stone’s description is that he seems to locate the battlefield between the abbey and the river, which would not have been observable from the Eleanor Cross.

  A 1756 map identifies a ‘Battle Dyke’ on the west side and the adjacent ‘Battle Furlong’ on the east side of the Fulbrook, a stream born of a spring on Hardingstone Hill, on top of which the Eleanor Cross is located. Over time the brook may have altered its course to follow the line of excavation behind the rampart once built along its eastern bank – in fact it may have begun to do so during the battle, as one account says the rain was so heavy ‘the guns lay deep in the water’, which would be consistent with the stream overflowing.*2

  The hypothesis portrayed in Map 17 accepts that Benet’s description of the location is correct and that Wavrin was right about the topographical details. Thus the Fulbrook was the ‘little stream’, and the abbey farmlands, which might be described as a ‘park’, stretched to the woods running from the Eleanor Cross towards the township of Hardingstone. Another source states that Bishop Wainflete resigned as Lord Chancellor and returned the Great Seal to the king three days before the battle in ‘Hardingstone Field’, next to Delapre Abbey.

  The artillery fortification along the Fulbrook commanded the London Road, with the woods covering the left flank and the abbey enclosure the right. Another stream, feeding two fish ponds, presented a further obstacle to a frontal assault, while any attempt to outflank the position along the Hardingstone Road would have been vulnerable to ambush from Delapre Wood. It was a strong position, akin to the one at Castillon on which Talbot’s last charge broke in 1453.

  The fullest account of the battle is in An English Chronicle, which also illuminates the role played by Archbishop Bourchier:

  The earls… sent certain bishops to the king beseeching him that to avoid the effusion of Christian blood he should admit and suffer the earls to come to his presence to declare themselves as they were. The Duke of Buckingham that stood beside the king said to them, ‘You come not as bishops to treat for peace but as men of arms’, because they brought with them a notable company of men of arms. They answered and said, ‘We come thus for the security of our persons, for those that be about the king are not our friends’. ‘Forsooth’, said the duke, ‘the Earl of Warwick shall not come to the king’s presence, and if he comes he shall die’.

  The Registra of Abbot Whethamstede of St Albans identifies Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, as the leader of this episcopal delegation. The other bishops were probably Grey of Ely and Neville of Exeter. However, An English Chronicle adds that the archbishop then sent Bishop Stanberry of Hereford, the king’s confessor, who instead of appealing for the king to accept mediation, ‘exhorted and encouraged the king’s party to fight’. Stanberry did not return from a second visit ‘but privily departed away’. As a result, ‘after the battle he was committed to the castle of Warwick, where he was long in prison’.

  In his Commentaries Pope Pius II states that Coppini was with Warwick’s army and ‘raised the standard of the Church of Rome, and on the ground that they were to do battle against the enemies of the Faith, he granted plenary remission of sins to those who were to fight on the side of the Earl of Warwick’. He also ‘pronounced anathema on their enemies, exhibiting before the camp an Apostolic letter which was believed to contain this formulation, though in reality its contents were quite different’.

  Six months later, when the tide of war seemed to have turned against the Yorkists, Coppini sent an indirect message to Marguerite frantically denying he had excommunicated the king’s army. But why would Pius II have lied in his private journal? He did dismiss Coppini from his bishopric in 1462, but for other reasons. Unless we are to believe the pope was attempting to deceive himself, there can be no doubt Coppini acted in an outrageously partisan manner, and that Pius II approved.

  Apoplectic fury that the Church had come out for the Yorkists would, of course, explain why Buckingham refused the bishops access to the king, and Stanberry would have warned the duke and Beaumont of their likely fate if Henry accepted Coppini’s mediation. Buckingham’s baffled rage was further inflamed by seeing his Bourchier half-brothers openly among the enemies in arms against him, many of them Kentish men who would kill him on sight.

  The Yorkists formed the usual three battles parallel to the earthworks along the London Road, and Wavrin says the attack was led by the ‘advance guard, commanded by Lord Fauconberg’. Warwick’s battle arrived at the Fulbrook a little later, and March’s later still. If accurately described, this was an oblique attack of the kind later m
ade famous by Frederick the Great. It works by drawing the enemy’s attention and reserves to the first flank attacked and then to the centre, leaving the remaining flank vulnerable to the knockout blow. In this case, the last flank attacked, on the Lancastrian left, was held by Grey of Ruthyn.

  Grey was probably a Yorkist Trojan Horse from the start, and must also have insisted that his submission should be made to March as his father’s representative; such a vital role would not otherwise have been entrusted to an 18-year-old who was leading men into battle for the first time. While the rain had silenced the royal artillery, it also made the earth rampart impossibly slippery, and Grey’s men had to help March’s troops climb over it.*3 The royalist position collapsed immediately and the levies fled towards the bridges over the Nene, where the crush pushed hundreds to drown in the river.

  As their army collapsed the Lancastrian lords made a last stand around the king’s tent and were slaughtered. Apart from them, however, there were remarkably few combat casualties – one source estimates as few as fifty-eight. This would be consistent with a battle in which the rain not only silenced the guns but also wet the archers’ bowstrings, so they could only loose a shaft or two with the spare strings they kept in their hats. If the earthworks were too slick to climb, then Fauconberg’s and Warwick’s battles may not have come to hand strokes at all, but rather milled around in the mud on the other side, making a lot of noise. As at St Albans, the battle was decided by a distraction followed by an abrupt dislocation of expectations.

  The defeat was an unqualified disaster for the Lancastrian cause. The king was now in their enemies’ possession and they had also lost three of their greatest magnates. Buckingham was succeeded by his 5-year-old grandson and Shrewsbury by his 12-year-old son, leaving two of the largest Lancastrian affinities leaderless. Only Beaumont’s affinity still had a leader in his 22-year-old son, who was with his father at Northampton. He was wounded but survived to join the other lords bent on avenging the deaths of their sires.